


Cost of Living

by Letterblade



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (not a huge thing but it's there), Angst and Feels, Dreamsharing, Lance is sharing his cockpit with a cow and I'm not sugar-coating this, Life Links, Lotor was a giant tool in this fic's continuity and I'm not sugar-coating that either, M/M, Nightmares, Past Lotor/Kuron Non-con, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Sendak/Shiro Non-con, Pining Lance (Voltron), Pining Shiro (Voltron), Poor emotional decision making, Psychic Bond, Road Trip to Earth, Suicidal Thoughts, Very handwavey plot, and guilt, not season 7 compliant, so much pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-06-24 17:43:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 44,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15635595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/pseuds/Letterblade
Summary: When Lance died in the cockpit, Allura brought him back with magic. And then they started dreaming of each other's oceans.When Shiro died in the cockpit, Allura brought him back with magic. And then all three started dreaming of each other's sorrows.Magic has consequences, everybody has too many feelings, and Allura and her undead menfolk share an unwanted psychic bond on their trip to Earth.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I started writing this a couple weeks ago and it got very much out of hand. My hope was to finish it before season 7 dropped, and post it complete since I already have enough WIPs going here, but, well, that's not happening.
> 
> I have five complete chapters and will be posting those rapidly as I try to wrap up the last few. Especially given that s7 will likely joss the hell out of this, I want to get it out of the way quickly.
> 
> That aside, this is mostly just large amounts of unbeta'd, barely edited soggy angst. I intended this fic to ultimately be Shiro/Allura/Lance and maybe some Keith/Lance to go with the Shiro/Keith, but we'll see whether anyone besides Shiro and Keith actually manages to ever kiss. Will update tags as needed.

After fixing the omega shield, Allura starts dreaming about an ocean. Not like any ocean she’s ever seen—not the brown lakes of Olkarion, not the simmering caustic seas of Altea. Blue and glittering in the sun, salt-wind and clean and bright. Foam over her bare feet. Heart aching, longing. It’s a bright ocean, an ocean she longs for.

Sometimes it becomes an ocean of pure light through a jagged rip in space, and there’s a long-fingered lavender hand in hers. _Please, Allura. Everything we ever wanted. Right here._

 

* * *

 

After fixing the omega shield, Lance starts dreaming about rolling fields. Sparkling crystal cities with arcs of silver habitat rings in the sky. Simmering caustic seas. No planet he’d ever seen before. Bright and glittering in the sun, flower-wind and clean and bright. Sun on his skin. Heart aching, longing.

Sometimes there are yellow-tinted eyes wide with wonder. _Finally. We’re home. All we ever wanted_. Sometimes he’s miles away, looking at the two of them, knowing this is right, and he doesn’t belong here, and, and.

It’s better than the dreams of dying, so he doesn’t even care.

 

* * *

 

It recurs. Allura tells herself it’s strain on her mind from the amount of time she’s spent pouring herself into Sincline’s hull, talking science and strategy with Lotor, preparing to walk between realities. She welcomes it, really. It’s relaxing, falling into that sea as she sleeps.

 

* * *

 

It recurs. Lance starts to feel like he’s a little kid again, back when he had that recurring dream of a castle that he could explore and have adventures in, because that had totally been a thing. If it doesn’t fade too quickly in the morning, he thinks, sure, he’s probably dreaming of Altea, but he’s seen pictures, and the hologram in Kaltenecker’s room, and all that? It’s pretty much on his mind all the time, because Allura? So it makes sense. And it’s still better than the dreams of dying.

 

* * *

 

Then everything changes, and Lotor falls screaming into his ocean of light, and the Castle crumples glorious into the void, and Allura pulls Shiro’s dead soul into her body, and everybody has a very rough day.

Allura doesn’t sleep for a long, long time that night, with Romelle and Coran curled in bunks that the Blue Lion has manifested out of closed walls. She sits in the pilot’s seat with her knees against her chest, arms wrapped tight around her legs, aching.

She dozes off slumped in her chair, and her dreams are thoroughly wretched and not worth remembering.

 

* * *

 

Lance dreams of a black starry void and a voice calling him, and wakes miring in guilt and the smell of cowpats.

 

* * *

 

Shiro swims through memories for a long, long time. One self; the other self. They have different textures.

The old memories: clear, distant, well-thumbed. Simple. Straightforward. He was himself. Garrison training. Keith’s young face. Pain and tremors in his arms, the weary familiarity of electrode gel. Singing dirty space shanties with Matt as they passed Uranus. The oldest memories in the glittering haze of childhood, tucked far away.

Captivity: fragmented, much as it was. Sharp-edged, purple, dim and unexamined. Holes ripped with bandsaws and yellow eyes and blows to his skull and _wanting_ to forget. Blood under his hands, blood in the sand. The fear, the fear he’d had ever since he’d realized the cold metal under his back was a Garrison examination table, that once he remembered too much, he’d stop functioning, turn into a monster or a gibbering ragdoll, break. The timer over his head used to be his body failing. Now it’s his _self._ Still ticking down.

Altea…

Voltron, at first: bright and clear. Battle-sharp, thick with determination. Push hard. Timer over his head. Keith never understood why he kept insisting. Yet here he belonged, here he could fight and be free, here with these unbroken, achingly _good_ kids with all the universe before them. He would carry them through. He would carry them through. No doubts.

…Altea?

The Garrison: shoved into a corner, embarrassing, dusty. Literally banging his head against a physics textbook, jittering in the hallway between classes. Anxiety and anger in the pit of his stomach as that jerk outflew him again and again and again. Halfway to failing out, finding his name on the boards, having to go down, and down, and down, to cargo track…

Subject Y0XT39—no, he can’t think about that—no, he can, he can remember without knives in his skull, those first few staggering minutes, numb, animal fear, his own corpse—

Cargo track? He’d been top of the class.

His own corpse. The Galra had his body, after he’d dissolved into Black. Somehow. It might still even be out there.

Voltron, at first: Battle-sharp, thick with determination and grief. Numbness. Push hard, make up for all their failures. Bewilderment at these strange small monkeys with no knowledge of the world. Fondness at how hard they fought.

The Black Lion: Stars and mirrors and void. A stray thought, an endless dream, bodiless. Mourning his own death under slowly spinning galaxies. Ripped from his body, saved only by the lion’s will. Almost enraged at her at times. Why bother. What kind of life was this. Reaching desperately for Keith as he sat inside the lion, him, his naked soul brushed up against his, but nothing but silence and his _no, please_. Reeling to sense a mind identical to his, a dying will calling to the lion, him. First suspicion, closing him out. Then his earnest plea.

Voltron, again: Frustration. Heavy and slow. Layered, layered thick: the pain stabbing through his head, the hisses his arm makes in the night, the lingering doubt, the _wrongness_. He needs to keep it together. For their sake. Lingering doubt mirrored in Keith’s eyes, Keith slinking off in the dark, and he’s alienated him, and he doesn’t know how to reach him. The timer’s counting down. Not even functional enough to fly a lion anymore, until he is, but the price for that is _Keith_ , so there’s no joy in it. Things he doesn’t want to think about. Fear.

The vise tightens. Memories dim, hazy, thick with denial and contradiction, his throat closing up every time he even thought about explaining. _Why_ , Allura asks, eyes sharp, and he can’t answer her. He just _did_. Hand Lotor his bayard. Fly to the Kral Zera. Instincts he can’t account for. Words dying on his lips. Compromised. He knows he’s compromised. He can’t think that he’s compromised. He doesn’t want to remember Lotor testing the limits of his obedience. He just wants…

He just wants to be himself and there isn’t even a self to be anymore and he’s just a broken soldier.

The vise closes and he watches like a passenger. Helpless in his own skin. The nightmares he used to have after his diagnosis, before they started being optimistic, before he responded well enough to the electrical treatments that the prognosis _probably_ wasn’t eventual quadrilateral paralysis.

Standing paralyzed as orange claws prod him like a toy.

Watching from the void, ghost in a machine, passenger twice over.

He doesn’t know how to forgive himself for pummeling Lance and Allura into the ground, breaking down Hunk and Coran, battering Keith down again and again and carving up his face, coming two ticks away from murdering all of them.

He doesn’t know how to forgive himself for sleeping bodies raining down into space, dozens more innocent lives on his hands on top of the slaves in the arena.

He doesn’t know how to forgive himself for overwriting another human being like he’s faulty code, innocent, exhausted, timer run out. For thinking those memories as his, even when he doesn’t want to, even when all that other him wanted was to be himself.

Eventually, through all that ocean, he wakes.

 

* * *

 

Allura wakes in a tangle of her own sweaty hair with Romelle shaking her gently, worry plain on her face in the dim blue light of lion’s night running.

“You were screaming,” Romelle says carefully.

Allura huddles for a moment, trying to remember how to breathe. Yellow-tinged eyes. Soft, well-kept skin, a hint of fangs, the silky weight of his hair. Claws tracing her skin. She wants to throw him off. She can’t. The thought of denying him makes her head pound. _Interesting_ , he purrs. _Good girl_.

Allura swallows three times, wonders if she’ll ever get the taste of him off her lips, and says, voice low and scratchy, “I’m terribly sorry I woke you.”

“It’s all right.” Romelle’s quiet, long enough that Allura picks her face up, heart rate starting to slow, shame still tight in her belly. “I get nightmares sometimes too.”

_Not like this_ , Allura wants to say, and stops herself, because whatever nightmares Romelle might have of Lotor, they’re probably _worse_. The self-styled god who wrung the life force out of her family one by one. Not the wretched guilt-fear complex of a silly little girl who’d kissed a monster because he’d said the right thing a few times, who would have given him her body if she hadn’t been warned. No, not like that at all.

 

* * *

 

Lance dreams of showing up for Garrison classes in his underwear, which is absolutely nothing new.

Lance dreams of rolling over Keith’s cooling body to see him glassy-eyed, blood smearing his face, cheek laid open to the bone, and knowing, _knowing_ it’s all his fault for not being strong enough, for failing to be there when he needed him, which is also absolutely nothing new.

Lance dreams of Lotor’s claws on his skin, which _is_ absolutely something new, and also absolutely fucking gross, thanks brain, would you please stop having escalatingly freaky nervous dreams and go back to no underwear in front of Iverson because by comparison to creepy space prince badtouch that’s fucking heavenly?

 

* * *

 

The first time they fight the new-crowned Emperor Sendak, Allura feels like she’s been hit with her own lion’s freeze ray, blood chilling in her veins, gut knotted so tight she might be sick. Sirens pounding in her head, irrational, jangling.

 

* * *

 

The first time they fight the new-crowned Emperor Sendak, Lance feels like he’s been hit with his old freeze ray, blood chilling in his veins, gut knotted so tight he might be sick. Sirens pounding in his head, irrational, jangling.

 

* * *

 

The first time they fight the new-crowned Emperor Sendak, Shiro clings to the wall of Black’s cockpit so hard his nails scrape on the metal. He hadn’t reacted like this at the Kral Zera, he thinks distantly. Too clamped down, too much under Haggar and Lotor’s control. His clone-self hadn’t had the same raw, visceral wilderness under the skin of his mind, had only run off a copy of the conscious memories—he’d never felt new memories surface, never felt the irrational jangling of something stirring just out of the reach of consciousness, pounding like sirens in his head.

Not like he does now, looking at that shaggy face over the monitors. He’d never remembered how Sendak had known of him. How Sendak had been able to get that far under his skin. He’d always told himself it had been something about the Castle virus, maybe something in the air fraying his self-control.

It hadn’t been.

He hadn’t known why Sendak made his skin want to crawl off his body.

But now he remembers how Lotor made him feel.

He’s probably hyperventilating.

“Shiro?” Keith calls over his shoulder, even as he pulls Black into a spectacular roll and dives for an attack run.

“I’ll be fine,” Shiro manages to choke out as he slides down to huddle on the floor. “Stay in the fight, Keith. You got this.”

 

* * *

 

That night, late and weary when they finally escape Sendak’s kill box, Lance passes out almost as soon as they’re safe.

The nightmares are—spectacular. Horrible. Countless bodies asphyxiating in space. Huge hands holding him down, probing, something else splitting him open. He’s Shiro in some of them, he’s almost entirely sure he’s Shiro, and when he finally claws his way to consciousness, he grabs at his chest like he isn’t sure what he’ll find.

Skinny. Brown.

Lance hyperventilates alone in the dark, feeling like he’s going to be sick. What the hell is _wrong_ with him? Why is he having nightmares of—of Shiro being _raped_ —what kind of sick bullshit is his mind pulling on him? What kind of a monster _is_ he?

He puts his face in his half-asleep cow, big and scratchy-smooth and warm and uncaring, and cries until he can’t cry anymore. For Shiro and Allura and _everything_. Until his eyes are puffy and his throat is raw and he’s so thirsty it hurts. Until he’s weary and wrung-out and sort-of-more-okay-somehow in the way you get when you cry your guts out.

 

* * *

 

Shiro wakes, after yesterday’s wretched fight, feeling strangely centered. A little calmer than usual. Breathing a little easier.

It isn’t how he usually feels after an embarrassing freak-out like that. Not how he expected to feel after spending a night tossing and turning and processing that a _second_ alien had violated him somewhere in the dim reaches of his memory.

Maybe it’s that Keith had kept watch over him. He’s asleep now, slumped half-sitting in the corner of the little bunk. He hadn’t asked. Had been comfortable with no explanation. Had just…been there. It must be that.

Shiro remembers what Keith had said, during that fight.

Shiro watches him sleep in the dim light, wiry arms clutching a pillow hard to his chest, hair messy and bare feet in the sheets, and knows that he probably loves him too, at least as much as a godforsaken wreck like him could love anyone. And he knows, sinking and sure, that Keith deserves better. Shiro’s still got a timer over his head. Goods damaged _and_ perishable. Keith deserves somebody whole, who can truly be there for him, without reservation or expiration. Same as Adam had. Shiro’s too selfish for love; he’s learned that much by now.

 

* * *

 

Allura wakes, after yesterday’s wretched fight, feeling strangely centered. A little calmer than usual. Breathing a little easier.

She isn’t sure why. It had been a hard fight. No gain except survival. Her dreams had been dim, bloody, wretched. And yet she feels clear and light.

It nags at her, occasionally, through the day, but soon enough the rest of her life drives it from her mind.

 

* * *

 

Lance mostly just feels hollow and hung over the next day, and apparently it’s bad enough that Keith has to yell at him to get his ass back into formation at least once. He blames Kaltenecker. Laughs it off. Can’t look at the call screen because Shiro’s in the background, sitting heavily in a passenger’s chair, going through some report or another.

What the hell is _wrong_ with him?

 

* * *

 

The first time they fight Haggar—Honerva—is an absolute shitshow. Allura not even in Blue’s protection, duking it out with the witch in some new contraption she’d built, pure magic, toe to toe. Hunk’s towing Blue protectively, there’s a pile of cruisers, no Voltron. Shitshow. Shiro spends most of it clinging to Black’s passenger seat as Keith flies like a maniac—a _brilliant_ maniac, he’s glorious as both a pilot and a leader now. It’s a chaotic enough fight that Keith doesn’t have a word to say against Shiro calling out targets from the back seat, and even passes control of Black’s lasers back to him so he can focus on flying and covering Yellow’s slowed bulk and the tiny white speck of Allura far below.

Shiro shoots one-handed, dead focused, and if he feels like his heart is clenching and jolts of lightning and white fire are pouring down his limbs in time with Allura and Honerva’s battle, well, it’s a nerve-wracking battle and he’s stuck here. Not quite useless, at least.

When the shitshow’s over, Allura’s completely drained from some horrible spell, snapped up safe in Green’s jaws as Coran shouts over the comms, and Keith’s pretty much throwing a _cruiser_ at Honerva to keep her from following them, and Shiro feels a strange chill around his heart and sweeps the field.

Red’s floating dead in space.

“Keith,” he blurts. “Get Lance.”

“Shit,” Keith says thinly, and Shiro follows the cruiser with a laser barrage as Keith wheels to scruff Red in Black’s jaws. Deja-vu. “What happened? Honerva wasn’t anywhere near him, what could’ve taken him down?”

“I—didn’t see it. I don’t know.”

 

* * *

 

Lance wakes slowly from a deep, cold, lightless void.

He _knows_ it, in his gut, even as he doesn’t want to think about it. Plain and simple and inescapable.

He’d died. Again.

“Lance?” somebody calls. A voice in the dark. “Lance?”

He feels weak as a kitten. It takes him a while to even open his eyes.

Shiro’s hovering over him, single hand warm on his shoulder.

Coran elbows Shiro aside, scanning Lance frantically with _something_ that chitters. “His quintessence levels are stabilizing. I think he’ll make it.”

“Oh my god.” That’s Hunk, wet-eyed and a little frantic. “Oh my god, Lance, you’re back, don’t _do_ that, you freaking _died!_ ”

Lance moves his lips aimlessly for a moment, trying to remember how to breathe, and finally manages, “Round two, ’s cool, still not goin’nywhere.”

Keith’s there, vague horror on his face. “You mean—this has happened before? When? How?”

“It’s my fault.”

That voice, small, cuts through them all, and makes Lance’s chest ache.

Allura’s lying near him. Some random planet they’d touched down on, maybe. There’s blue grass, and he’s flat on his back, and Allura’s a few feet away, back to him, curled into a ball. Spatters of pink blood on her, on the grass around her.

“It’s my fault,” she says again, wretched.

Everybody’s there, and everybody falls silent, and Coran scoots over, sets a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Allura,” he says carefully. “It seems that Number Three’s life force is linked to yours.”

“Oh, crap,” Lance croaks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eh, let me get at least a little more up before the season drops. Maybe after this I'll go to one a day.

There’s a blurry, absolutely wretched round of explaining everything to everybody, what with the whole him dying back at the omega shield thing, and then eventually Lance has to lever himself upright and go feed his cow.

Not a single other damn thing in the universe makes sense right now, but at least he can feed his cow. Everybody is kind of freaking out—Hunk especially, he feels like crap that Lance died and he didn’t even know, maybe they all do, and Lance _may_ have blurted something about they were all kind of shit at knowing when somebody else has a problem, which _may_ have made Shiro look pained and guilty—yeah, everybody’s freaking out. Lance would probably be freaking out if he wasn’t so damn tired.

Mostly he’s tired.

He feeds his cow. He milks his cow. Kaltenecker nuzzles wetly at his hair and he just about starts crying again.

He very slowly drags himself to his feet, gets the shovel, and starts getting rid of the cowpats.

When he opens Red’s ramp, shovel of shit in hand, Allura squeaks.

They both freeze, right there, for a long moment, and then Lance croaks, “Uh sorry but this is really heavy,” and totters down to dump it out.

She steps delicately to one side, and just kind of stands there looking sheepish.

“Can I come in?” she asks eventually.

“Y-yeah. Uh. Give me a moment. There’s more where that came from.”

“Oh dear,” she says, slightly mournful, and gives him a moment, waiting awkwardly as he shovels shit.

“This,” he says, when he’s done, “is my life. I live in a space lion with a cow doing cow things. I’m going to leave the door of my space lion open for a bit to air out the cow things, you probably want that too. And I guess I’m your pet zombie now or something?”

Allura blinks for a moment. “You’re…rather more intact than those creatures we fought in the game?”

Lance leans against the wall of Red’s ramp and starts laughing because there’s literally nothing else he can do. “And I’d better stay that way. Look, I put _effort_ into my skin care routine, I can’t have it rotting out under me.”

Allura makes a sort of hiccup noise that might be a laugh. “No! I don’t—I don’t think it’ll ever be like that, you’re alive, I just…oh, quiznak.” She scrubs a hand over her face. “May I…?”

“Yeah,” he says, very quietly, and follows her up the ramp.

She’s never visited him in Red before, and poor Red is…honestly a bit of a mess. Allura looks like she’s trying not to wrinkle her nose, and Lance thinks with a stab of guilt that this is her father’s lion that his cow has shat all over, just like it had once been her father’s hologram room that his cow shat all over, and really, it’s all way too perfect a metaphor.

He offers her the pilot’s chair with a wave, because there’s not a passenger chair here, just a cow.

She looks like she wants to refuse for a moment, then winces, and sinks down into it. “Lance, I…I owe you an apology.”

Lance frowns, shakes his head, but she plows on.

“I wasn’t thinking. When I used my magic on you. Not about the consequences, about what it might do to you. And I’d wondered, from time to time, if there was some sort of residual connection, but I put off thinking about it, I was…”

He holds up a hand. She plows on.

“I was scared,” she admits, voice small. “I didn’t want to face a mistake like that. Especially not…not one that affected one of my closest friends so profoundly.”

Lance’s heart does a weird clenching thing in his chest at that, a very painful weird clenching thing, and he swallows hard. “It’s okay.”

“But—”

“Nope,” he says, a little reckless. “No buts. Look. It was my call to take that hit, and I’d rather not be dead. Simple. Whatever that winds up meaning…I-I’ll be okay.”

“Lance,” she says quietly, and there’s something very sad in her eyes. “You didn’t have to.”

“Yes I did,” he says, without hesitation.

She opens her mouth.

“You’re our best hope,” he says, flat and firm, before she can speak. “You can use the teludav. You can work magic with Voltron that _nobody_ else can. The White Lion chose you. You’re—we didn’t know about the colony then, and you’re almost all that’s left of something really special. You are the _least_ disposable person on this team, so don’t give me that. Voltron needs you. The universe needs you.”

“Lance—

“And all that just makes me sound like an asshole because you are worth far, _far_ more than what you can do. But that was _my_ call, I’d make the same call again, and I accept the consequences. I’d accept the consequences even if you couldn’t bring me back, never mind what’s going on now, so don’t apologize, for god’s sake, Allura, you’re carrying enough—”

“Lance, the mice told me.”

Lance freezes.

“Oh,” he says, after a moment, voice small. “Okay. Is there a lake on this planet I can just go fling myself into. Or a river. Or something. I need to blub blub in peace. Wow. The mice told you. Story of my freaking life.” His eyes sting. “Here I was trying to handle this like an actual dignified human being. Any chance you can just, like, pretend you didn’t hear that? It was lost in translation. They mixed up their mouse notes and were actually telling you about Keith’s giant goober Shiro crush, not like that’s news…”

“How were you trying to handle this, exactly?” Allura asks quietly, and Lance can’t even bring himself to look at her, he’s too busy hiding his face in his hands.

“Well first I wasn’t going to tell you because I thought Lotor would actually be good for you and be what you needed, which, okay, yeah, I absolutely deserve to be run up a flagpole for, and now obviously it is really _really_ not the time to bring it up because that’s a dick move. Like am I just going to sidle in here being like oh, sure, the guy you’re really into turned out to be a douchebag, but here I am, non-douchebag, at your service? Jesus, that would be creepy. And. And not fair.” He manages to take a breath. He’s running off at the mouth, he knows. He needs to stop. He needs to stop before he ruins everything more, but he doesn’t know how, and he’s just falling apart. This is too much. This is the final fucking straw. “Really how I was going to handle it was never bringing it up and being your friend because you deserve a friend and not a creepy asshole. I don’t want to be a creepy asshole. Oh god.” Shit, is he actually crying. “I’m a creepy asshole anyway, aren’t I? I’m a creepy asshole, and you thought I was your friend, and now you’re stuck with me, and—”

Something wraps around him.

It honestly takes him a few seconds to figure out that she’s stood up and hugged him.

By then he’s over the tipping point and can’t possibly stop himself.

It’s…even, he supposes, in some distant part of his mind that’s still thinking about anything other than sobbing his guts out, _again_ , on somebody who deserves it far less than his shitting cow. He held her when she cried about being profoundly betrayed by somebody who’d promised her true companionship and universal peace and used her and her people as goddamn batteries. Now she can hold him while he cries about stupid bullshit. It’s not fair. But it’s even.

He wrings himself out eventually.

Her suit’s hydrophobic; he watches his tears and snot ball up and roll graciously off her shoulder with a sort of dim, weary irony.

“I…I don’t know why I’m crying,” Lance mumbles, wretched. “I’m sorry. I have too many feelings or something.”

“You’re not a creepy asshole, Lance,” she says, very soft, still holding him as he hiccups through the aftershocks. Somehow her saying asshole in that prim British accent makes him giggle a little, frayed. “You’re a truly kind-hearted man who’s growing so fast and dealing with so much and who really, truly doesn’t deserve to be burdened with this connection.”

Lance takes shaky breaths as he tries to process that, pulls back a little to scrub his face with his sleeves. “Connection,” he echoes slowly, and then falls silent, reeling a little. “Allura.” He carefully lifts his face out of his sleeve, gathers everything he’s got left for the courage to meet her eyes without expiring on the spot. “I’ve been dreaming of Altea. A-and other stuff, all kinds of other stuff, but since the omega shield…”

She nods slowly. _She’s_ the one who can’t lift her eyes now. “This ocean you talk about on Earth…is it blue, and salty, and sparkly in the sun?”

Lance nods, throat tight.

“When I…when I brought you back,” she starts carefully. “I put my life force into you. My magic. It was the only thing I could think of. The Red Lion had protected you from the radiation’s damage, you would have burnt to nothing otherwise, but the blast was so massive that both of you had been completely drained. I…filled you back up, I suppose. The lions are made to channel life force, but you…”

Lance swallows.

“It seems that my life force is sustaining you. That’s why you died when Honerva drained me. And that link…our minds are connected a little. Our dreams.”

“Okay, questions,” Lance says, head spinning a little. “D-does it go both ways? If I die, do you…?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Am I…draining you?”

She shakes her head. “No. Not that I can feel at all. It’s not like I have to consciously focus to keep you alive. I think it’s just a tiny trickle. Because you aren’t…quite stable.”

Lance lets out a long, shaky breath. “So like. I leak life, you top me off, neither of us realized it?”

She nods. “I’m going to start looking for a way to stabilize you. Maybe I can imbue something you can carry with some of my energy, to support you directly. Maybe I can make it so you don’t need any support whatever. That might—be a little riskier, I might need to do some alchemical work on you directly.”

“Okay.”

She’s quiet for a moment, then says, a little slowly, “It would…probably be possible, through this connection, for me to.” She stops, swallows. “To override your will, or borrow your senses, or…end you. I _won’t_. I swear on life itself, I won’t ever. But. You deserve to know what kind of situation this is.”

Lance reels under that realization for a moment, then just bows his head. “I know you won’t. I trust you. And hey, seeing through my eyes or whatever could actually be kind of handy on some missions, that’s fine.”

Allura’s face crumples a little. “Oh, Lance.”

He scrubs his hands over his face again. At least she seems to be pretty okay with pretending the whole wretched crying jag didn’t happen. That’s good. “One more thing…” He swallows. “Shiro.”

Allura’s face crumples the rest of the way. “So…it’s true. You’re resonating with each other. Through me.”

 

* * *

 

Shiro looks slowly between two red-rimmed pairs of blue eyes and feels his blood run cold.

“With both of you,” he echoes eventually.

Allura nods. “Your souls haven’t directly touched, as mine has both of yours, but you’re close enough, and in a sense, I served as an unwitting bridge. We’re all three linked.”

Shiro feels himself sliding into a numb haze. It’s full-body. Like his entire _being_ is shrinking back from this, even more violently than it had shrunk back from his realizations about Sendak. His realizations about Sendak that had come when his mind was linked to these two. _These_ two of all people. Allura who damn well has enough of her own shit. Lance who’s so untarnished and emotionally vulnerable. _Fuck._

“No,” he says, after a long moment. “This is unacceptable.”

“Is there anything we can do to make it,” Lance starts in a rush. “Less…shitty?” He stalls out, then restarts. “I won’t pry on purpose, I promise. I don’t even think I know how.”

“I’m already looking into ways to stabilize Lance,” Allura puts in, earnest. “Our connection is unfortunately necessary for his well-being, as things are right now. But perhaps I can safely disentangle you, if it’s something residual…”

Shiro manages another breath and tries to sound reasonable. “That would be good. My mind is…not going to help your well-being. Either of you.”

Lance drops his gaze.

Oh, hell. What does he already know? Shiro forces himself to take another breath. Another. This isn’t the time for this. “What exactly does this mean for us, until we can fix it?”

Allura takes a deep breath and starts explaining what they’ve observed so far. Dream sharing. Some degree of empathic resonance. She isn’t sure what else there might be.

Shiro takes that in for a long moment, trying to center himself without closing his eyes. He’s too far gone to know what might start playing across his eyelids if he did. “Our battle with Sendak,” he says after a heavy silence.

Allura and Lance trade a nervous glance.

“I…kind of freaked out more than I expected when I saw him, yeah,” Lance mumbles, which is all kinds of alarming and also doesn’t answer any of his questions.

Allura nods. “I believe…we both shared your reaction.” She pauses, looking slightly puzzled, then asks, “What about the next morning? Now that I think back on it, I remember feeling…calm.”

Shiro feels a faint chill run down his spine. “Me too.”

They both look to Lance. He hunches his shoulders, shuffling his sneakers on the floor. “What…kind of calm?”

“A tired kind,” Shiro says. “But not how I usually get after a bad day.” The words come out slow, a little fumbling. Admitting that he has bad days often enough to be familiar with his behavior around them is new, embarrassing—he’s always preferred to pretend those days are rare. Then again, all of this is new.

“A calm after the storm,” Allura says thoughtfully.

“That was…probably me,” Lance says, looking at the floor.

“Lance?” Allura prompts, sounding faintly concerned.

“I…” He hunches more. “I’d had a ton of bad dreams. And I wound up crying a bunch. Ugh, this is embarrassing. I swear I’m not usually this much of a soggy wreck.”

Shiro feels like he’s been punched in the gut. He hadn’t had nearly the grade of nightmares he’d expected that night. Just a mire of yearning and loneliness and people’s backs. Not _rape_. He’d chalked it up to Keith’s presence, been grateful, moved on.

No. That yearning had been Lance’s. And had Lance instead…?

“So crying,” Allura says thoughtfully, “is part of how humans process emotions too?”

“I…guess?” Lance says. “Like…you kind of feel better after you cry, even if nothing has actually changed? That what you mean?”

“Allura, this has to stop,” Shiro says, trying desperately to keep his voice level, put some strength into it, when mostly he’s busy panicking about how revoltingly _wrong_ this all is. To offload all nightmares and reap the catharsis while Lance suffered alone? “It’s— _unconscionable_ for me to put this on you. Either of you.”

Lance’s head comes up with some raw look in his eyes that Shiro can’t read at all, and he says, painfully earnest, “It’s not your fault.”

Shiro can’t face that look, so he stands, paces, stares at the blank wall of Black’s cockpit as she sleeps. Keith and Krolia are off roaming this random planet’s night after Lance and Allura asked for privacy. Just the three of them. Claustrophobia hits him, sudden and gnawing, and he can’t even turn on the screens.

Finally, chasing a bitter hope, he asks, “Does distance affect it?”

“I…don’t know,” Allura says, sounding a little taken aback. “It might. Most of my magic requires physical contact. Though this bond has remained without it…”

“We’re going to be rendezvousing with a rebel fleet soon to take on supplies, and so Matt can go with us to Earth. I could go with them. I’ll be more use with the rebellion than here anyway. Keith’s more than capable of standing on his own as Black Paladin.”

“What,” Lance squawks. “You’d really…”

“Are you sure you’ve recovered enough for that sort of work?” Allura asks diplomatically.

“I’m not an invalid,” Shiro says. Snaps. That was more of a snap. Damn it. He should have better control than this.

“That’s,” Allura starts, and then thinks better of it.

“Sorry.” Shiro forces himself to turn away from the wall, bring up an apologetic smile. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I guess that’s a bit of a sore spot.”

“I understand,” says Allura graciously, but Shiro is mostly caught up in Lance’s alarmingly intense puppy eyes.

“You…don’t want to go to Earth?”

“I can’t let that be a priority,” Shiro says, keeping his voice steadily neutral. That, at least, is close to the truth. There’s a part of him that wants to, of course; even without any strong attachments, it’s hard not to think of the place he was raised in. There’s a part of him that’s terrified to, that doesn’t want to face a whole institution of people who knew him before _this_ , that doesn’t want to face the look in Adam’s eyes as he comes home in ruins _._ “Sam can help you liaise with the Garrison. You’ll be fine without me. And I’ll see where the rebels need me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I has a [tumblr](http://letterblade.tumblr.com).


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yup, pretty jossed, still posting. :P

Allura will work on it. Not that she doesn’t freely admit that she’s making it up as she goes. But either way, next night they rendezvous with the rebels and that’ll be that.

Shiro seriously considers not sleeping, but it happens anyway in spite of himself, a few hours of fits and starts in the dark.

He dreams of Lotor’s fangs and Lance burning alive in a radiation spike, and can’t even tell whether they’re his own nightmares or Allura’s.

In the morning, once they get underway, he finds himself pacing the narrow areas of Black, restless. He hasn’t decided how to tell Keith about this, so Keith mostly just watches him in silent concern. Krolia has opted to fly with Pidge for that day—to trade spy hacking tips, as far as anyone can tell—so it’s just him and Keith. Which is a bit of a relief. He’s jittery, underslept, raw with guilt.

He’s also lonely.

Which makes no sense. Keith’s right there, red-armored hands on the control bars even if most of him is hidden by the chair’s high back. He’s been far more alone than this in his life. And yet he’s so lonely that it _hurts_ , deep and slow and gnawing in his chest, the kind of lonely he’s only felt in his darkest moments.

Lance. Lance is flying alone in Red, has been for days. And is the most extroverted member of this team.

Shiro hesitates for a time. His presence might not be positive for Lance, all things considered. But—maybe that’s just cowardice. At the very least, he owes him…he doesn’t even know what, honestly. There’s too much built up. Not just everything that just happened, but the guilt Lance carries from not being able to help his clone-self. The ways Lance has been short-changed by having his period of greatest growth go unacknowledged by a distracted and snappish and compromised team leader.

“Keith,” he calls. “Do you mind if I go switch it up too?”

“Sure,” Keith says, easily enough that he trusts that he means it. “Where to?”

“Red. It’s…been a while since I had a chance to have a real talk with Lance.”

Keith’s quiet for a moment. Then says, “Got it. Kinda wish I could join you.”

“Well, there’s always the next time we camp,” Shiro says, hoping his voice isn’t showing how much he’d choked at that thought. Keith’s probably going to have to know about the bond at some point. But what sort of things Shiro was bleeding all over it? No. Not if he could help it.

Keith veers Black down towards Red. “Hey, Lance. I’m dropping off Shiro, he says he wants to visit.”

Lance squawks over the com. “Aw crap! Literally. Okay. Uh. Sure?”

Shiro goes through the brief but frustrating rigmarole of getting his helmet on one-handed, seals it, and drops out into the void.

This—this he’ll never get tired of. They’re in deep space, between systems, and there’s nothing but starry blackness and vacuum-silence and the Lions hanging in the dark. Or, well, moving at ludicrous speed, but he’s carrying a lot of velocity himself from dropping off Black, and he soars free for twenty or thirty long and glorious ticks before Red scoops him up in its jaws with marvelous gentleness.

Inside, Lance has turned a crate over one section of the floor, near which Kaltenecker chews her cud, tail flicking disdainfully as she notices Shiro. From the general odor of the place, Shiro can take a guess at what’s under the crate. Well, he’s smelled much worse.

“Good morning!” Lance says, with some semblance of cheer, and the ache in Shiro’s chest eases just a little. “Sorry about the, uh, cow situation, it’s kind of inevitable.”

“Shit, as they say, happens,” Shiro says dryly. There’s no passenger chair, so he opts for leaning against the wall. Lance’s flying has at least gotten a lot steadier.

“Yeah, I’m getting a pretty vivid demonstration of that. I’m trying to litterbox train her, but that hasn’t been going so hot. Mostly she kicks it over. Cow class didn’t really cover spaceship scenarios, I’m kind of making it up as I go.”

Shiro blinks. “Cow class.”

“Yeah yeah!” Lance has turned, pretty much steering with his foot, but given that they’re just running a straight line through space for nine hours, Shiro isn’t exactly going to fuss. Also not going to fuss about Lance being in his civvies. “So Cuba takes its farming super seriously. I guess there were all these embargoes back in the day or something? I dunno, history’s whatever. But there are all these urban farms and stuff, even these days, and home ec covers all of it. One of the most sustainable countries in the world, they say. Anyway, that’s why I’m the cow man.” He reaches out proudly to scritch the beast between her horns. She keeps chewing, methodical and unimpressed.

“So that night I was dreaming of weeding the entire time for no reason?”

“Yyyeah that was probably me. Especially if you were weeding in your underwear. I am such a cliche about the class in your underwear dreams.”

“Hey, who doesn’t like a good class in your underwear dream. I used to have those all the time.” Shiro offers him a wry smile. “They got worse when I was TA-ing.”

Lance hesitates, and when Shiro focuses, he can feel nerves instead of loneliness gnawing at him. Mostly he tries _not_ to focus on that. It’s bad enough that this is happening, and bad enough that one of his own team is nervous around him. “Do you still get them?”

“No. Well, I had one about a week ago, but I’m guessing now that was you.”

Lance laughs, light and quick. “Yeah, probably. Uh. Do you want me to make you a chair? How do you make a lion make a chair? You do not want to sit on the floor in here, there is no part unshat.”

Most of it’s scraped reasonably clean, at least, but Lance does have a point. “Just focus on it. The lion will know what you need.”

Lance blinks, then spins his chair back around to face the console normally and takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes.

Eventually a chair rises up from the floor, close enough to the pilot’s seat for easy conversation, and Lance hoots triumphantly and pets the console, and Shiro sits.

Silence hangs for a moment.

“So, uh.” Lance jitters slightly. “Is there…something you need?”

“What, I’m not allowed to make a social visit?”

“No, yes, of course you can make a social visit, like anytime, I just…”

“Didn’t expect one?”

Lance pauses. “Am I gonna sound like an asshole if I say no?”

“I’m the one who’s let you down.” Shiro pauses. “Well. Both of me, I suppose.”

Lance’s brow furrows. “No. Jeez, why would you think that? I…I failed you. Uh. Other you? Him? Also you. Not the other way around.”

“I have his memories. I think…he exists through me. Just as I exist through him.”

“Oh.” Lance picks at the arm of his chair. “Good. He was…one of us too. It’s not fair to just…pretend he wasn’t.”

Leave it to Lance, Shiro thinks, to decide a mind-controlled clone was his friend too.

But of course he’d been in Black when they’d both chosen to give the imposter a chance. First a chance for life, after they felt his yearning and despair as he began to flicker out. Then a chance for wings, after they felt his earnest and urgent need to help the team, clear and pure as Shiro’s own.

“I let you both down,” Lance blurts, a little raw. “Both of you tried to reach me. _Me_. And one time I wasn’t strong enough and one time I wasn’t a good enough friend. I was your _Red_.” He blows out a quick, bitter sigh. “Keith would’ve been able to help you. But he was gone. And I wasn’t enough.”

Shiro fumbles, taken aback by the yearning _pit_ of resignation that’s opening somewhere inside him—somewhere inside Lance, leaking through their bond. “Lance, you were the only one I could even come close to reaching. Even that…meant a lot to me.”

“Yeah, I’m not in this for a participation prize,” Lance snaps, voice thick.

Shiro’s stunned into silence for a moment. “Then…what are you in this for?”

He half expects some crack about parades and babes. Instead Lance is looking off into space with knife-narrow eyes, jaw working.

“To make a difference. For the universe, for…for this team. To be there for my friends. Those are the easy answers, they’re true.” He’s quiet for a while, like someone struggling with whether or not to even admit something. “I’m in it to be worth something. To actually be good enough at something to matter. To not be—t-to not be some cargo-track dumb-dumb who’s probably gonna wash out by finals and who nobody even knows exists.” He laughs, brittle and a bit wet. “Y’know, when this whole thing started, deep down? Like when we were running from the Garrison and all that? I wanted to be as good as Keith, and I wanted to be able to help you. I guess it’s sort of liberating now. I can finally let go of that. It’s never gonna happen.” He swallows hard. “Shit. Why am I fucking leaking feelings everywhere? Like I actually don’t know why. I am way cooler than this. But I don’t think it’s the connection thing? I think these are all my own feelings. I just. Damn it. Okay. I am not going to cry on you, I have done that enough.”

“It’s okay if you need to,” Shiro says gently.

“No it’s not,” Lance croaks.

Shiro accepts that, and slowly digests everything Lance had just babbled, and gives them both a moment to gather themselves. “Can I ask,” he says eventually.

“Mn?”

“Why Keith? And why me? Why is it that personal for you?”

Lance gives a vaguely hysterical laugh. “Wow, okay? I mean, I could tell you. It’s all super embarrassing. Just. Stuff. Dumb stuff. Look, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I’d like to know at some point. If you’re comfortable sharing. I…” Shiro pauses, processing a stab of guilt. Maybe they’re in some sort of horrible guilt feedback loop. “I don’t know you nearly as well as I should, given how long we’ve been working together.”

Lance sighs and pulls one knee up to his chest to hug it. “…me neither. Sometimes…sometimes it seems like we’re all teammates, sure, but not many of us are friends.”

“You can’t force friendship.”

“No,” says Lance, a touch defensive. “Course not. But…” He sighs and falls silent. “This whole…link thing,” he says eventually. “I-I know it’s really pissing you off. And that’s legit, I just. Why?”

Shiro flattens his hand on his knee to force himself to stop picking at the edges of his armor. He’s fidgeting more, he’s noticed, now that he doesn’t have two hands to cross or clasp or whatever. It’s awkward. “Because…because I know _I_ can’t escape this. My memories, my body, everything I know of what kind of horror is out there. But if your goal, since the beginning, has been to become more capable and help this team? My goal has been to keep all that from affecting any of you, and get you home safe and unbroken. But I can’t protect you and Allura from my own mind. Not like this.” He pauses, considering what he does know of Lance. “It’s not personal. Not beyond the fact that you’re my friends and I don’t want to hurt you.”

Lance is quiet for a while, long enough to worry him, then says, simply, “Okay. And you’re…really going to go away for that?”

“I think I have to.”

Lance opens his mouth, closes it, and says, “We’ll…miss you.”

There’s something cold and tight sinking in Shiro’s stomach. “I’ll miss you too. All of you. But it’s better this way. If the distance helps with…this.” He waves his hand vaguely at his temple. “If it doesn’t…we’ll see. I may well be more use with the rebels anyway.”

Lance bites his lip, and the knot in Shiro’s stomach tightens. “Just don’t stop calling us for months on end even when you’re not on radio silence. I’m never gonna forgive Keith for that. Asshole.”

Shiro offers him a smile. “Oh, I’ll keep in touch. I’m bad at butting out when I’m benched. Just ask Keith.”

Lance snorts. “It’s not like I didn’t agree with you about not splitting up.”

“Sure, but you were the one he needed to hear it from. I was out of line.” Shiro pauses for a moment, shoving his thoughts into order, then says, “Lance, take care of him for me? While I’m gone?”

Lance’s face softens a little, and he leans back in his chair. “Always. I…I know I wasn’t a good Red for you. Other you. But I’ll be his as long as he needs me.”

“Thank you,” Shiro says, and means it. He knows being apart again is going to be hard on Keith, especially after—everything. “And Lance…you were. I…he…was glad to have you.”

Lance makes a tiny squeaking noise, turning to look at him in surprise, and Shiro plows on before Lance tries to stop him.

“Being effective in that kind of position takes two. It doesn’t matter how good you are if the other person doesn’t let you in, doesn’t listen or share their needs. Or…can’t. You’ve grown into an excellent paladin, regardless of how bad a position you were put in. And you deserve to know that. That’s how I…how both of me let you down.”

Lance apparently cannot, in fact, take a compliment. Not a real one. He ducks his head, completely floundering for a moment, then mumbles, “What do you mean…can’t?”

Shiro sighs and looks down at his hand. “Once Haggar’s control started…he couldn’t explain why he was behaving differently. He realized he was compromised, but…”

Lance’s face falls for a moment. “So what you—he—told me, when we were stuck at the white hole…”

“It was the closest he could come.”

Lance squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. “Fuck. Okay, I gotta admit, I really appreciate everything you just said and also I still feel stupid.”

“Even if you had figured it out earlier, he would probably just have been activated earlier.”

“Well that’s…uplifting.”

“Great!” Shiro smiles cheerfully. “I’ve got plenty more inspiration where that came from.”

Lance snorts. “I’ll bet. Oh man. Remember when were fighting that robeast that one time and you were all like remember how I said we don’t have to beat it, well I think we have to beat it? That was my favorite speech. That one was the best.”

Shiro laughs, feeling some coil of tension ease out of the air. “No it wasn’t. That was not even close to my worst.”

Lance is grinning now. “What, what do you think was your worst.”

“Olkarion, probably. The first time, with the cube.”

“Oh _god_ , fuck that thing.”

“Though I honestly don’t even remember what I said. It was probably useless, though, I was drawing blanks.”

“Man, I don’t remember either, I was mostly freaking out about Pidge ‘cause she’d gone down so hard.”

“I think we all were.” Shiro gives a fond, distant smile. “It’s hard not to.”

“Yeah, she’s so tiny. And evil. Y’know the weird thing is, even when you were drawing blanks, I felt safe with you. I think we all did. Well.” His brow wrinkles. “Dunno about Allura, you’re as much a squishy human as the rest of us.”

_Oh_. Shiro feels something small and warm in his chest, and sets it carefully aside. “Did that…change?”

“After you were gone? I mean.” Lance chews on his lip. “You disappeared from your _cockpit_ , that was freaky. Hunk kept worrying somebody else would be next. And then…” He makes a noncommittal sort of noise. “Keith had a rough start.”

“I got that impression. He never told me most of the details.”

“How much…did you see? In Black?”

“Not much, to be honest. Impressions, most of the time. And Black was flying blind for some of that, I think.” He pauses, considering. It’s a long day’s flight to reach their rendezvous point. “Tell me?”

“The saga of Keith being a ding-dong? Okay, if you’re that bored. Sooooooo there we were, doing what only Allura does best, trying to paste together the Voltron Coalition while Zarkon was in a coma or whatever, and all they wanted was to see Voltron…” 

 

* * *

 

In the controlled chaos of supplies moving every which-way and Rolo telling Romelle tall tales and Matt and Pidge clinging, Allura is wrapping up some intelligence exchange with a little knot of rebel captains when she sees Keith cutting through the crowd like a knife through butter. She braces herself against a chill of guilt when she sees the anger in his eyes.

“Did you know,” is all he says when the briefing wraps up and they’re left alone.

“Which part?” she asks. It’s not defensive. She’s got no ground to defend. Least of all from Keith.

“That you’d bind him to you and Lance like that.”

At least Shiro’s explained everything, she thinks wistfully. Keith deserved to hear all the reasons they had to be separated again. “No. I had no idea that could happen.”

Keith closes his eyes, and breathes once, deep and slow, like he’s putting the anger aside.

“I…was acting solely on instinct when I brought him back. When I brought both of them back.” Allura closes her eyes for a moment, voice small and quiet. “I knew too little of what the consequences might be. If you’re angry at me for playing god, you’re not wrong.”

Keith shakes his head slowly. “I’m not angry about anything that keeps Shiro alive,” he says, simple and true.

“It was never my wish nor my choice to put him in this position.”

“Okay.” He calms much faster, this new Keith. Falls back to his poise like he has an anchor now, centering him in his will. Two short years for him, and he’s changed so much. Allura aches at how fast their short human lives are slipping through their fingers. “Can you fix it?”

“I will certainly try.” She sighs, feeling her shoulders slump. “To be honest, Keith…I don’t fully understand why Shiro is as deeply entangled with us as he is. The situation with Lance—that’s clearer to me by now. With the right materials, I should be able to break his dependency on me, and I’d hope with that our link would fade. But Shiro…”

He listens without judgement, this new Keith. Then offers, “I could try to ask Black. As…well, as much as anyone can, I suppose. I’m not as close to her as Shiro was.”

Allura feels a chill. “Was?”

“She’s only moved for me,” Keith says quietly. “You think I didn’t offer Shiro his old chair? I think…” He chews his lip, once, a trace of his old easily-frayed nerves. “I think she’s trying to protect him. Flying any lion is a strain, especially Black, and the link between his soul and his new body is still weak.”

The chill intensifies, and Allura looks over at Shiro, a faraway dark figure talking with Krolia and some of the rebels, and feels a dread she can’t quite name. She’s just being paranoid, she tells herself. If Keith—eternally devoted Keith—can handle Shiro parting ways like this, then she can at least have the grace to do the same. “I…can’t imagine that sits well with him,” she murmurs.

Keith huffs something like a laugh. “Not really. I don’t _think_ he’s just using the bond thing as an excuse to leave because he feels useless, but…”

“He’s not,” Allura says without thinking.

Keith frowns just slightly. “His feelings are his own.”

Allura bows her head. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Keith lets it go without any more fuss, and after a quiet moment, asks, “What you said before. Are you angry at yourself?”

“For any number of things. Including meddling with the souls of two of my dearest friends, yes. However necessary, however well-meaning…” She paces a little, words gnawing at her belly however much she tries to hold them back. “Lotor…spent weeks convincing me that we had so much in common. That we wanted the same thing, for the same reasons, through the same means. I…wonder sometimes. How right he was.”

Keith squeezes her shoulder, brief, grounding. “You’re nothing like him, Allura. If you were, you wouldn’t wonder.”

Allura folds her hand over his before he lets go, brief, not too needy. She hopes. “I…hope you’re right.”

The dread stays with her, though. Through the last round of goodbyes, through the rebel ships rising off the barren rock they’re camped on, through the evening. She almost asks Lance if he shares it, thinks better of it, turns in early. Curls in her soft ancient blanket she’d pulled from her old bed during the evacuation. Tosses. Turns.

She dreams of a black starry void, of infinite falling, and not having the breath to scream, profound dread. She dreams of stardust and funeral vaporizers and the gates of death.

She wakes to Keith’s voice, tiny and frantic, over the emergency channel of her com earrings. “…ake up, Allura, do you read?”

She makes some muffled noise of assent, tongue too thick to make words, and folds a hand over her chest. Her heart’s beating like a rabbit’s, and she’s cold to her bones, and something’s _wrong_ , wrong, wrong—

“Something’s wrong with Shiro. Captain Olia said he felt faint after their first hyperspace jump, then fell unconscious. She’s heading back now.”

“Stars and fire,” Allura breathes, feeling sick.

 

* * *

 

It seems to take Shiro a long, long time to wake up.

There are voices, somewhere far away, but he can’t make them out. He’s vaguely aware of a few fingers on his left hand, one foot, a pressure on his chest. It takes him a while to feel his other foot, long enough that he’s starting to wonder if he’s down another limb.

There’s no sound of engines. Hadn’t Captain Olia’s scrappy old ship been clattering away under him? Leaning back in his seat, light-headed. Hyperspace travel had never made him dizzy before. Well, he’d get over it.

Stumbling when he stood.

What’s _happening_ to him?

He pries his eyelids open, eventually. Body heavy and tingling, and it’s like sleep paralysis, like he’s one step away from figuring out how to move. The light blinds him. Blur of white. Something soft on the side of his face.

Allura, her hair down, hands on his chest, calling his name. More voices beyond, footsteps. Keith, hovering, raw worry on his face. “Shiro, you’re awake—can you hear me? Can you move?”

Shiro manages to move his lips, a little, wordless.

Lance, in his pajamas, lands next to Keith, and suddenly he feels something other than bleak emptiness. Radiating worry. Relief.

Allura’s eyes widen, and she grabs Lance’s hand, and he squeaks, ears reddening.

Shiro takes a deep breath. Two. Scrabbles his fingers in the dirt. “I’m okay, Keith,” he manages, voice thick. “I’m okay.”

 

* * *

 

“This is _not_ okay,” Shiro says, voice remarkably level.

“I know,” Allura says quietly. “Gods, I know.” She folds her hands carefully on her knees. “I wish I could say that I’d return to Oriande right now and search in the seat of alchemy itself for a way to fix this. But…”

“We can’t get there safely.” Shiro sighs. “And even once we have a wormhole-capable ship again, Oriande can’t be our first stop.”

Allura feels her heart clench with—relief? Understanding?

“The colony’s more important,” Shiro says, and there’s not even a hint of resentment in it. “They’re your _people_ , Allura, I understand.” A trace of a smile for a moment. “Besides, Romelle would have my head.”

“Yeah, she would,” Lance says. He’s chewing on his lip, brow furrowed. “Is it…is it both of us? Like do we all have to stay together?”

“I…to be honest, I’m not sure.” Allura clenches her hands, unclenches them. “I think our connection to you is reinforcing your soul’s attachment to this body.” She nods at Shiro. “Helping it take root. But I don’t have a solid understanding of _how_ , or what I could do to make you less dependent on us. Or even whether the dependence is solely on me, as it is with Lance, and the link between you is some sort of secondary resonance.”

Shiro’s gotten up to pace, like he’s working hard to stay calm and focused, and after a long silence says, “I think it might be both of you.”

“Well, crap,” says Lance.

“Why…?” says Allura.

“When I was…coming back, I suppose. I was conscious for a while, but not really in focus, and I couldn’t move. I felt…stuck. Then you came up.” He nods vaguely in Lance’s direction. “And I started to feel like myself again.”

“Oh,” says Lance, very quietly.

“So I guess you don’t need to give up on that part after all,” Shiro says, giving him a small, wry smile.

“Yeah, be careful what I wish for, I guess.” Lance ducks his head.

Silence drags for a moment until Shiro stills his pacing, sighs, and says, “So this isn’t going away soon.”

“It…yes, that seems likely.” Allura doesn’t quite meet his eyes, feels small and cold. “There is one thing I’d like to try, and could try soon, if we find the right material. But even if it works, it may only lessen my bond with Lance.”

“What…is it?” Lance asks, fidgeting with his sleeves.

“A Balmera crystal can store my energy. It’s how Coran could sometimes open a wormhole in my absence.” She works very hard to keep the wistfulness out of her voice. “If we can get our hands on a small one at a trading depot, I may be able to charge it and link it to you. That way, at least if something happens, you won’t be in danger. I…don’t know if it would ease this resonance between all of us. It may not. But at least…at least one life won’t be dependent.”

“Good,” Shiro says quietly. “Whatever we can do to put us at less risk.”

“…so basically you want to give me a sparkly thing,” Lance quips, and his smile almost reaches his eyes.

“If only all our problems could be solved with sparkly things,” Allura sighs.

“I _know_ right.” Lance pouts. “Also stop nearly dying, it’s really stressful.”

“Stop _actually_ dying, it’s even more stressful!” It’s out of her before she can stop it. “Both of you!”

“Don’t worry, if I died again Keith would kill me,” Shiro says, with a small and lopsided smile.

“I can’t die before I get to Earth and my mom kills me,” Lance says sagely. “Oh my god, my mom is gonna kill me.”

Not actually, Allura thinks, not from what’s seeping out of him: wistfulness, love, worry. She can sense it, if she focuses. Little wonder somebody as private as Shiro is so upset by this. “This cannot stand. Not forever. We’re not in disagreement about that, Shiro, I promise.”

Shiro nods. “I know. And I’m frustrated, but I’m not angry with you.”

“I’ll learn what I can,” Allura says. “I…I wish I had more to guide me than my instincts. But I will find a way to fix this without endangering either of you.”

“Or yourself,” Lance murmurs.

“In the meantime,” she continues doggedly, “I think that perhaps it would be best if we did not let this affect our relations with each other. Whatever we feel, whatever we see—we’re not meant to. None of us consented to this bond.”

Shiro straightens a little, squaring his shoulders. “That’s…a good idea. Thank you.”

Lance opens his mouth, closes it, and looks away, face shuttering.

 

* * *

 

“It’s a _terrible_ idea,” Lance groans, slumped in the pilot’s chair of the Red Lion.

Kaltenecker chews.

“A-at least I think it is. Maybe it’s what they need? But how am I supposed to just sit here and pretend it isn’t happening? That I’m not—dreaming all that stuff—”

Kaltenecker chews.

“I suppose I don’t know anything. It’s not like I’ve…I’m fine, like nothing is wrong with me, and they’ve both been through so much…”

Kaltenecker chews.

“But how it is going to _help_ them? To just bottle it up! Shiro doesn’t even have a pet! I mean, I guess he could talk to Keith’s wolf?”

Kaltenecker chews.

“Gooddd how come Keith just goes and randomly tames a magic space wolf anyway, he is _such_ an overachiever, and now he’s barely even talking to me anymore.”

Kaltenecker chews.

“But talking about stuff is supposed to help, right? Even…big stuff. That’s what Mom always said.”

Kaltenecker chews.

“And I…I guess that means I just have to sit here and deal with it. Fuck.” Lance curls up and sticks his face in his knees. “Well they can’t stop me from talking with you. You’re a good girl, you’re not going to tattle like _some_ mice I could name.”

Kaltenecker chews.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sticks fingers in ears and yells _la la la I can't hear you_ about that absolutely godawful evil clone joke from somebody who supposedly has his clone's memories and a shred of decency and compassion*

Shiro dreams of the whole universe gleaming over a floor like a mirror.

The Black Lion isn’t there to stand over him. Keith isn’t there to watch over. Just him, and the expanse, and silence.

His reflection in the floor still has black hair. White shock of a forelock, scar. Arm ripped from him, machinery sparking at his shoulder. Hollow eyes.

Shiro sits cross-legged on the mirror-lake floor, and after a moment, his reflection sits too.

“Are you rejecting me?” Shiro asks eventually. “Is that why my link to m…”

He stops.

Because it’s not his body, is it? He’s wearing the flesh of another sentient being. Taking his memories.

His reflection shakes his head slowly.

Shiro feels the weight of his regret. The burned bridges. Keith turning to leave. Allura’s wary judgement. Lance shrinking back wide-eyed. _Knowing_ he should be better than this, but not knowing how.

The relief of not having to fail at being himself anymore. Of not having to be some hurtful, compromised sham kneeling at Lotor’s feet.

Shiro presses his one hand to the cold slick ground, and after a moment, his reflection rests his palm against his.

“Haggar’s influence wasn’t your fault,” Shiro says quietly. “I’m not any better than you. Just…luckier.”

Denial. Not all Haggar’s influence. Uneasy disbelief in Keith’s face as he said he was proud of him. He’d fragmented the team. Weakened them, even before his mind went purple and his fist slammed into Allura’s ribs.

“I’ve not always been the best with people either.”

A faint, entirely humorless smile, upside-down in the watery mirror universe.

“Do you hate me?” Shiro asks quietly.

His reflection shakes his head. Envy, maybe. Wanting to be him. Not how he’d expected to get that wish, maybe, but far better than it could have been. The thought is weary, black, comes with memories of pods raining down, sleeping children never to wake.

Then his reflection flips his hand over, points up, points at his own chest.

“…no. I was suspicious, certainly.” Shiro huffs a bitter laugh. “I think for a while there I thought I was going nuts, that I was just some…strange imprint of energy, not even myself, that you were me. Then sometimes I was angry that you’d taken my face, my life. But you felt different to Black.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Black wouldn’t have moved for you without both our wills.”

His reflection gives a very sad, tired smile.

Something touches Shiro’s shoulder.

His reflection doesn’t seem alarmed. The water ripples. Just a hand reaching back down to rest over his, no sensation, nothing like what’s warm and rough on his shoulder.

_Remember me_ , he thinks, almost like he thought it himself. _Please. But don’t carry on my mistakes._

He wakes with a deep, shuddering breath, feeling very cold.

Keith’s leaning over, shaking him. “…ro? Shiro?”

Shiro tries to talk, makes some garbled noise around his leathery tongue, swallows, has another go. “Keith. What’s wrong?”

Keith pulls his hand back, relaxing a touch. “Nothing. Just.” His neck is aching, he realizes, and his arm is dangling strangely. “Didn’t think you’d want to spend the whole night in the passenger chair.”

“…oh.” Shiro rubs his face, stretches slowly. “You’re right. I probably shouldn’t.”

Keith’s in his plain clothes, jacket and belt gone, like he was one step away from turning in himself. His old, well-worn t-shirt from Earth is tighter on him now, baring an inch more of his collarbone, clinging to his triceps. There’s a strand of his hair stuck to his cheekbone, and Shiro wants to brush it aside. Instead he levers himself out of the chair, brings up a smile. “You turning in?”

“Mm. It’s kinda surprising how tiring it can be to just cruise for a day.” Keith’s pretty much gone for a run the moment they set down for the night, every time. The tiring part for him, Shiro suspects, is keeping _still_. He stretches as they both amble down the narrow corridor into Black’s belly, walking in front of Shiro, and the hem of his shirt rides up.

Hell. When had Shiro fallen for him this hard? When had he stopped being that awkward kid?

When he—hadn’t been Shiro.

Shit.

He clamps down on everything, methodically, one stray thought at a time. The realization unsettles, deep, and he wants to press his palm against glass again, and can’t. That legacy is his now. Every part of it. Knowing what came from where…probably isn’t going to change anything.

“Keith,” he asks quietly, as Keith is about to turn into his narrow bunk.

Keith makes a questioning noise, turning his head. His hair curls. God, this is ridiculous. On the run in a tiny convoy, low on resources, reeling from betrayal, managing an unwanted mental connection, and this is what his mind gets fixated on? Keith’s hair curling. “When you left Voltron.”

Keith drops his gaze, just a little. “Yeah?”

“Was it because of—well, because of my clone?”

Keith’s turned to face him fully now, and there’s a bit of a crease between his brows. “No. Or…not anything he did.” He leans against the wall, eyes downcast, like he does when he’s trying to put something difficult into words. “I felt like I didn’t belong. Like I could do more good elsewhere. And even more than that…” His mouth twists. “You…you know me. I expected somebody to start keeping score the moment I messed up. I-I _knew_ it wouldn’t be you. But…maybe some part of me was scared it would be.”

“Not ever,” Shiro says, plain and earnest. “Keith…not ever.”

Keith’s eyes widen a touch, and he ducks his head a little, and nods. “I…I don’t regret everything that came of it. Meeting my mother, finding the colony.” A furry head shoves demandingly under his elbow, and he cracks a smile, scritching his wolf’s ears. “Yes, and you. No, I already fed you. But…I regret the reasons I left, and the rift it’s driven between me and my team. Does that even make sense?”

“Yeah. Causality’s…a hell of a thing. Good things coming out of bad choices or circumstances doesn’t cancel them out.” Shiro huffs a laugh. “Otherwise, what, do I send Haggar a thank you for curing the ALS card?”

Keith snorts. “Or Lotor a thank you for saving my ass at Nacxela card?”

Shiro tries not to twitch too visibly at the name. “Please don’t do that again.”

Keith gives one faint, tremulous shrug. “Any of us would have done the same.”

“Still. You’d fuss if it was me.”

“ _God,_ ” Keith breathes. “Don’t even start.”

“Keith,” Shiro says, and Keith’s head comes up at his tone. “Will you believe me, this time, when I say that I’m proud of you?”

Keith stares at him for a moment, wide-eyed, with a tiny noise in the back of his throat, and then his face softens into a smile. “Yeah. I think I could manage that.”

It’s his left hand he offers to clasp, and Shiro doesn’t have anything left to hug him with, so it’s just Keith’s arm around his shoulder, and Shiro’s chest is aching.

 

* * *

 

That night, Lance dreams of curling black hair and the wind in the desert. Keith whooping in the dry hot air, smell of leather and hot oil, and he’s got stubble and a scar on his cheek and is wearing all black with bare arms and is the most glorious thing in the universe. Until the bike spins out, and he’s struggling to wake up as the crash plays over and over around him, knowing it’s just a nightmare, it’s just a nightmare, this can’t be happening, but he can’t wake up in time to not see the heavy orange boots. Long purple claws picking up Keith’s limp body. _If you want him back, you know what to do. On your knees._

He wakes in a cold sweat, shivers for a long time in the dark.

He has to ignore it, he thinks. He doesn’t have a choice.

 

* * *

 

That night, Allura dreams of wandering through a maze of stores in the space mall and every one opens on to another one and never onto the open arcade and she doesn’t know how she’s going to get out of there, and both her brothers are there but they don’t have arms. They don’t seem to mind, they’re chattering all the way, but she has to open all the doors for them and she can’t hold her gun. Which is a problem when they find the shop full of sentries, and she gets Luis behind the counter and Marco behind herself, but they’re pinned down under fire and she doesn’t have a gun and she doesn’t know how they’re going to be able to get out. She doesn’t know how to save them. Marco kicks behind her with no arms and she’s no good without a gun.

She wakes in a cold sweat, shivers for a long time in the dark.

She has to ignore it, she thinks. She doesn’t have a choice.

 

* * *

 

That night, Shiro dreams of swimming through space. No helmet, no suit, and it’s warm and silky soft like spring wind, and he can breathe and move and it’s glorious. Nebulae splashing off his skin. Stars falling around him. Icy comets and asteroids glinting like diamonds, catching the light of some great nova that stands glorious and motionless and stunning. Harmless. All the light and fire spreading out around him, and the nova has rings. Two rings. Crossing like an X. No, he thinks. No, not again, not here, please, no. Space dust scattered out from two broken rings. Burning. Body after body after body like streaks of ice in the vast void. Frozen. Dusty purple, swollen. His cousin. Everyone he’d gone to school with. Aunt. His old martial arts tutor, the strongest warrior he’d ever known. Mother. The lady who’d braided his hair every night before he went to sleep and woke her in the morning, every morning, for six decades. Father, Zarkon’s black sword driven through his heart.

He wakes in a cold sweat, shivers for a long time in the dark.

He has to ignore it, he thinks. He doesn’t have a choice.

 

* * *

 

Near the end of a particularly intense day of pining, which Allura is gamely ignoring, Lance opens a private com channel to her and with absolutely no preamble shouts, “Jesus Hernando’s Hideway Christ, Allura, if Shiro doesn’t tell Keith in the next five minutes I’m gonna _explode._ ”

Alura is actually startled into laughter. “And good evening to you too, Lance!”

She can hear a rustle behind her as Romelle cranes her head, but well, there’s not exactly privacy for gossip in these cockpits. “He is driving me _nuts_.” Lance flops dramatically over his console. “I think he’s been looking at Keith’s hair for like the last thirty minutes. Keith’s mullety hair.”

“Perhaps he is trying to handle it like an actual dignified human being?” Allura says brightly.

Lance groans. “Yes but he also has _eyes_ in his _head_ and has existed in the same _space_ as _Keith_ for more than five _minutes_. God, Allura, we _all_ know Keith is gaga for him!”

“Gaga,” Allura echoes. “Is that a technical human term?”

“Yes. Highly technical. Let me tell you of the head of the gaga research division, she’s called Lady Gaga. In a moment. I’m not done bitching. Oh my god. I am this close to telling Keith myself.”

“That you’re in love with him?” Allura says innocently.

“Nn _oo_ uh,” Lance groans.

“Are you sure?”

Lance buries his face in his hands. “Sure, okay, yes, he’s another scorchingly beautiful out of my league person I can be into, there’s a list. I’m not in love with him, I have a stupid crush on him that I’m butthurt about, that’s different. Butthurt is also a technical term.”

Allura sighs fondly. “They’ll build a stronger relationship if they work it out themselves.”

“How very dignified human being of you,” Lance mumbles through his hands, and somehow, with all the garbled emotions he’s broadcasting, Allura quite abruptly realizes that the list includes all three of them. Herself. Keith. Shiro.

Something in her chest aches.

It’s…not a good time to think about this sort of thing. Not for her. Not for a while. _Curse_ her wayward heart.

“They just…I _know_ they love each other.” Lance’s face is still in his hands, and his voice is very small. “I can _feel_ it. They could be happy. They deserve to be. Somebody should be.”

He’s unhappy. Allura can feel it now, resonating in her chest, even as she tries to ignore it. Desperately unhappy. “A relationship isn’t going to fix everything, Lance,” she says gently.

“I _know_ that! Jeez. I’m not _that_ stupid. I just.” He jitters with a frustrated noise. “Shiro’s holding himself back because he doesn’t think he’s good enough. Can’t you feel it? _Shiro!_ He’s like…he’s one of the best people in the universe, and he can’t see it, and it means he’s just letting Keith _hang_. And _Keith_ doesn’t deserve that. And…ugghhhhhh.”

“I haven’t exactly been fishing around for what Shiro feels,” Allura hedges around the gnawing pain in her heart. “We talked about that.”

Lance shuts down like she’s thrown a bucket of ice water on him, so hard that she’s left reeling a little. “Right. Yeah. You talked about that.”

He closes out the call.

There’s barely anything from him as they pick a planet to settle on, and all through dinner he ensconces himself between the Holts, fishing for family stories, alternating between squawking with laughter and staring blankly at their more esoteric ones. He doesn’t look upset, he loos—happy. Just not particularly looking in Shiro’s direction, or hers.

She hadn’t thought she’d notice if Lance wasn’t looking in her direction.

She hadn’t thought it would feel strange.

As they start to drift off for the night, she gathers herself and goes to apologize.

“Lance…”

On his way to Red, he turns, blinks at her, holds up a finger before she can decide where to go from there, and says, with great import, “So: Lady Gaga.”

 

* * *

 

That night, Lance dreams of stepping off the silver ramp of a landing pod to cheering. Ribbons waving in a bright blue sky. Hundreds crowd up, shouting and smiling, marks shining on their faces like confetti. So many of them, alive and happy. Little children with ears they hadn’t quite grown into yet, scampering up to greet him. Hope against hope beating desperate in his chest. They’re _alive_ …

A purple statue lies broken in the dirt. A red carpet leads from his feet to the empty pedestal, strung about with ribbons and flowers.

_Welcome home_ , says Romelle, with ribbons in her hair. The crowd is carrying torches. _Empress._

He wakes in a cold sweat, shivers for a long time in the dark.

He has to ignore it, he thinks. He doesn’t have a choice.

 

* * *

 

That night, Shiro dreams of turning at the leaning palm tree, past the cracked wall where old Mrs. Wiggles meows for fish every morning, and counting the sidewalk cracks. One. Two. Three. The one that has purple flowers growing in it. Five. Six. The hopscotch squares. Turn right into the driveway. It’s been a while, but the street’s all the same, so everything must be okay, right?

The house’s roof has fallen in.

The headstones stand at angles, some of them a little sunken, some of them with moss. The two littlest ones have withered white flowers on them. Dusty candles that burnt down ages ago.

If only he’d come home sooner…

He wakes in a cold sweat, shivers for a long time in the dark.

He has to ignore it, he thinks. He doesn’t have a choice.

 

* * *

 

That night, Allura dreams of a black steel door opening in front of her and a ghastly roaring like a dying star. Her body is heavy. Resignation. This has happened. This will always happen. Every day she will go through this door. Beyond is a sea of light and sound, and in the center of that sea is packed earth, and in the center of that packed earth some small figure shivers in black rags. The sea is starting to pound, waves that shake the earth, calling for blood. Kill or die. Kill or die.

Lance, shivering in black rags, unarmed and defenseless, looks up at her with wide blue eyes.

Kill or die. Kill or die.

She wakes in a cold sweat, shivers for a long time in the dark.

She has to ignore it, she thinks. She doesn’t have a choice.

 

* * *

 

This time, it’s Shiro who calls Allura, earlier in the day and looking vaguely guilty. “Allura, if you don’t mind.”

“Mm?” She brings up the call from where she’s lounging in Blue’s pilot chair, comparing folk songs with Romelle. She feels—strangely okay today. Not the storm blown over kind of okay which would make her worry Lance has been crying in the night for all three of them, but something more centered. Even given how godawful last night’s dream had been. Her heart aches at the sight of Shiro. “What is it?”

“I apologize if this is out of line, but are you…meditating or something?”

“No. I’d actually wondered if that was you…”

They blink at each other for a moment, then call the Red Lion.

“Welcome to the Kaltenecker Day Spa, how may I help you?”

Lance is in his pajamas in the pilot’s chair, silky robe arrayed around him, leaning back and steering with his bare foot. He’s soaking up a face mask, resplendent, headphones on, and hasn’t even bothered to peel off whatever he’s got on his eyes. Some sort of fruit slices.

“Can you hear us?” Allura asks.

“Red’s piping you through my headphones,” Lance says smugly. “Because we’re in _space_.”

Allura would have thought that after a few years, even a boy from a pre-contact planet would have left behind the habit of using “space” as a substitute for “advanced.” Apparently not.

“You’re radiating,” Shiro says.

“ _Good_. That’s the goddamn idea. I will do self-care for all three of us losers if I have to.”

Allura sighs and closes her eyes, focusing. Lance doesn’t fight her. He’s wide open, deliberately spilling himself over them both, heedlessly generous as always. “Oh…that feels lovely.”

“Dude,” says Lance. “Can you actually, like, feel it? Physically?”

“Maybe a little. My face feels cool. But it’s hard to tell whether it’s my imagination, to be honest.” She sighs wistfully. “It’s been so long since I had a good soak…”

“How does lying there with stuff on your face make you feel that good,” Shiro asks, sounding a bit bewildered.

“I dunno. ‘Cause being clean feels good, and being soft feels good, and it also feels good in some of the same ways swimming does, like that thing where you splash water on your face and suddenly everything is a little bit better? It’s like that but it lasts.” He’s quiet for a moment, then adds, too casual to actually be casual, “Could show you.”

“Not right now,” Allura says. “Because you’re not doing it without me, and I need to fly Blue. Wherever we set down next.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lance raises one hand in a lazy salute. His fingertips are damp and shiny, like he’s worked on his nails too.

“Can I?” Romelle asks from behind Allura. “Join you? Or is this just a link thing.”

“My services are open to all,” Lance says expansively. “I just need to know how much to mix up by tonight.”

“Count me in!” Coran crows. “Though do be careful with the mustache!”

“I would never dream of damaging such a treasure,” Lance says, a smile tugging at his mouth under the mask. “Shiro?”

“I…” Shiro hesitates, like he’s debating something with himself, and Allura can feel a thin trickle of frustration from him. Not frustration with Lance, she’s fairly certain. With himself. “I suppose I could give it a try.”

“Woohoo!” Lance hoots. “Hear that, Kaltenecker? We’re in business.”

Kaltenecker moos.

 

* * *

 

They touch down on a crater-ridden rock, and before they pop the atmosphere tents they’d traded a round of lion-aided pest removal and some jugs of milk for at a border outpost, Lance says, “Wait a minute. Allura, could you freeze up that crater over there?”

“Yes…?” She complies, and Lance follows it up with a slug of fire from Red.

“Oof, overdid it, don’t want to boil us…”

“Hold on,” says Pidge. “You’ll need to take it down about ten degrees Celsius, so…”

“22 ghizagas of ice,” Hunk says. “Factoring in cooling time while we eat.”

“What?” Pidge yelps. “How’d you get that faster than I did?”

“Hey. You compsci, me engineering, thermodynamics my job.”

They pop the tents, have a picnic around their impromptu onsen, and then settle in to let Lance do his thing. Hunk’s done this before. None of the Alteans seem out of their depth. Pidge demurs, though not after Lance has extracted a rain check for getting to fix her hangnails once the facials are done. Krolia simply points out that she has quite different skin care needs and stretches out on a blanket to stargaze.

Shiro, having been strictly ordered to change into his barely-used black pajamas, settles cautiously with the knot of people-getting-facials, feeling large and scarred and entirely out of place.

“C’mon, Keith,” Lance wheedles without a hint of shame. “If Shiro’s doing it, you can do it.”

Keith gives him a dour look for that blatant unfairness. “How do you know _I_ don’t have different skin care needs. Also I don’t need it.”

“You’re human enough, and everyone needs to relax. Especially our esteemed leader. Even if he has stupid perfect skin and hair which he probably washes with _bar soap._ ” Lance blows him a raspberry. He’s in high spirits, Shiro can tell, basking in the attention and the chance to pamper people.

Keith lets that go, and pads past like a cat to sit with just his feet in the hot spring. Then his eyes widen a little, and he sinks further in.

“Or that,” Lance says cheerfully. “There you go. Isn’t that nice?”

“Fine,” says Keith. “Yes, it’s nice, now go put goop on people.”

Lance grins. “Goop, coming right up.”

There’s two big bowls and two small ones. Big ones are an Altean formula and a human formula, Shiro realizes quickly enough. One of the small ones is apparently a custom mustache conditioner for Coran, who’s practically sparkling with glee. The other remains a mystery. Lance is taking his time coming around to Shiro, probably to give him a chance to settle in, so he goes to stick his feet in the hot spring too. Then his legs, savoring the slow release of the heat sinking in, especially into his knees. Too much standing in cockpits during firefights.

Keith looks over at him and offers him a careful smile, which Shiro returns. This is, in fact, nice. Keith’s starting to _relax_. It’s a rare look on him, and gorgeous, and Shiro is going to have to come up with an excuse to look somewhere else soon.

Fortunately, at some point, Lance comes to give him one. “Ready, big guy?”

“Sure,” Shiro says. “What should I do?”

“Just lie back and relax.” Lance plops down a blanket over the rocky ground. “You can sit up again in a few minutes and do whatever, you just wanna give it a chance to dry, otherwise it’ll slide off your face and make a mess. Now let’s see…”

“Do I have to close my eyes?” Shiro asks, a touch nervous as he settles, feet still in the spring. He can hear everyone around him, soft chatter, contented noises, Pidge’s keyboard as Hunk tells her to goddamn relax already. He should damn well know that he’s safe and they’re safe even with his eyes closed. But still.

“Nah. You can skip the space cucumber slices if you want, though they do help with tired eyes. All up to you.” Lance settles in behind Shiro’s head and smoothes back his forelock, and Shiro feels his breath catch. Somehow he hadn’t accounted for the fact that this would involve Lance touching him a lot.

He forces himself to breathe, and for a moment, his eyes do drift close. When he opens them again, Lance has pulled over the mystery bowl and has a fingerful of something thick and grayish. “Ready?”

“Mm,” Shiro says.

Lance starts right on the bridge of his nose, which he did not expect, and the grayish stuff is cool and soothing even through the scar tissue. “What is that?” he asks after a moment, as Lance starts working it in with light, easy motions.

“You know that stupid itchy pully thing scars do?”

“Yes,” Shiro says, which is an understatement. Sometimes he feels like his whole _skin_ doesn’t fit right, a suit of clothing with too-tight seams, with all the marks he’s got.

“So scars aren’t flexible like normal skin, that’s why they pull. And the skin right around it takes a lot of strain. This kind of helps with both of those things, especially with keeping the skin around it really moisturized and elastic so it itches less. I made it for the stuff on my back.”

His back. It takes Shiro a moment to parse that. He knows pods don’t always get rid of scars—he’s got a magnificent one on his side from Haggar all those months ago, duplicated onto his clone—but. “Weren’t you in your armor for that?”

“Yeah, I have armor prints.” Lance says it lightly, but it comes with a slightly terrifying mental image, even by Shiro’s standards, and he breathes for a moment. He doesn’t remember getting the brand on his shoulder; he just knows it’s there. No memories to make him panic. Just breathe. “And they did the pully thing a lot when I moved my arms, so I did some experimenting.” He finishes with the scar formula, pulls over the standard issue big bowl. “Okay, here comes the rest. I’m gonna take a bit working it in, since I can tell you’ve never exfoliated in your life, so just relax.”

Shiro breathes. Puts aside thoughts of branding as best as he can. Relaxes. Occasionally looks to see Keith watching them quietly over his shoulder. Pidge is sitting with her feet in the tub too, finally divested of her computer because Hunk, already gooped up, is kneading her shoulders as she groans. Coran is lavishing Romelle with some tall tale as they lie there marinating in their skin care, and Allura has become one with the hot spring, straight-up floating with a plastic pillow to keep her masked face above water and her hair swirling behind her like a cloud. Krolia’s settled in to her waist, leaning back with her eyes closed, basking. Lance’s hands are sure, gentle, moving in small circles across his face. The cool mask settling is, in fact, surprisingly relaxing.

“Is it good?” Keith asks.

Shiro doesn’t want to disturb it, so he just raises his hand in a thumbs up.

Keith makes a _hn_ sort of noise, then says, “Do me too.”

“So pushy, mullet,” Lance says, flicking a drop of goo at him before massaging the rest into Shiro’s forehead. “Fine, you’re next. Good thing I brought extra scar goo.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, written before season 7 aired, Veronica is now my queen. Also, queue the soap opera theme music for this chapter, dear god.

Their journey rolls on. Life rolls on, sheltering in five lions in the great dark. And three of them live with their dreams and wills crashing against each other in the night.

It’s…not as bad as he’d feared, Shiro has to cautiously admit, after a week or two. Two shopping trips haven’t turned up a tiny Balmera crystal, but Allura’s hopeful. She’d had the right idea about how to handle the bond, he thinks, even if it itches at him sometimes to wonder what nightmares he’s spreading to them, how much they know. Better not to ask. Better to hold their distance and act like everything is normal, tune out whatever emotions are leaking around them.

Allura’s been busy, often spending long hours in the evening meditating within her lion, searching for a deeper understanding of the whole mess. She claims Alteans don’t need as much sleep. Romelle’s called her on it to her face, but that hasn’t stopped her. Guilt still trails in her wake even as Shiro does his best to tune it out.

Shiro doesn’t dream of his reflection again, and every day he feels a little bit more comfortable in his new skin. He thinks.

Lance is…distant. That’s the part that bothers Shiro. He doesn’t even seem to be spending much time with Hunk. Pidge and Matt are in cahoots at all times, and most of the time when Lance ventures forth from Red, it’s to rattle amongst the team with a theatrical exuberance that feels like nothing’s changed since Voltron first formed. He talks quietly with Allura sometimes, Shiro notices. He’s committed to supporting her. But beyond that…beyond that he seems hollow.

One long day of flying, as Shiro talks softly with Keith about his growth as the Black Paladin and has trouble taking his eyes off the tendons in Keith’s hands as he flies, Lance seems particularly off. It’s a low, antsy frustration that gnaws in Shiro’s belly, mounts, grows pangs like knives.

He considers talking to him when they land that evening. It…would be breaking the truce. Not that they haven’t skirted that more than once, though mostly for harmless little things like what led to that whole spa night. But Lance might need it.

Instead, as he comes down Black’s ramp with Keith, Lance comes to him. And not with his usual good cheer. Romelle actually squeaks as he charges past her like he’s on the warpath.

“Okay, I have something very important to say to both of you,” Lance snaps.

“Yeah?” Keith says, sounding a little prickly.

“Kiss him or I will.”

Shiro freezes.

Lance is glaring at them both with more steel in his eyes than Shiro’s ever seen. In spite of himself, Shiro tentatively tries to get a sense of his emotions through the link, and it’s a bubbling morass he can’t even begin to parse.

“What the fuck are you playing at,” Keith says flatly.

“Kiss. Him. Or. I. Will.” Lance points at them both in turn.

“Lance, no,” comes Allura’s voice—she’s jogging down Blue’s ramp, worry plain on her face.

“Lance,” Shiro starts hesitantly, trying to parse what Lance even means. He wants to kiss Keith? He wants to kiss _him_? He can’t be serious. “Why…”

“Because I’m getting fucking tired. I know what my job is now, okay?” He jabs his fingers into his own chest. “My job is to feel everything and try to be the cheerful one and love everybody and know it’s not going anywhere and not even be able to talk about stuff. And I don’t want pity.” His voice is hoarse. “And I don’t want to stop. I just want you to not fucking make it harder. And for you to let yourself have one _goddamn_ bit of happiness that I didn’t have to _make_ for you.”

Shiro flinches, guilt dropping cold into his belly.

“And you are worth _galaxies_ , Shiro,” Lance finishes, fervent, barely noticing Allura catching his shoulder. “And if you’re worried about what Keith deserves, Keith deserves to be with somebody he loves. So fucking get your head out of your ass already!”

“Lance,” Allura says, almost pleading.

“Please yell at me later or I’m going to cry like a soggy dishrag again and nobody wants that,” Lance says, rushed, and eels out of her grip, and turns to march for Red.

Red’s jaws close on a ringing silence.

 

* * *

 

There’s a knock on Red’s nose.

“Pity party and yelling at Lance party are still both postponed,” Lance says over the speakers without even lifting his head out of his hoodie.

“Uh, neither?” comes Hunk’s voice. “Dinner party. ’S just me.”

“…oh.” Lance waffles for a long moment, takes a look because one cannot trust Hunk to not bring a posse, then eventually sighs and lets Red open up.

Dinner, apparently, is something in a space tupperware crock that smells kind of good and a little intense. And Hunk is…Hunk. Just him. No posse. Not visibly upset or angry. God. Lance had done that idiotic little show in front of the whole team, hadn’t he?

“I’m not hungry,” he says as Hunk hands it over.

“Eh. It’ll keep.” Hunk snorts. “I wasn’t exactly going to make something that needed to be eaten hot, you’d all starve from the drama.”

It is still warm, though. Lance wraps around it without even particularly thinking about it, hugging the warm plastic to his chest. “How is everybody?” he asks eventually.

Hunk blows out a sigh. “Shiro and Keith are holed up in Black. It’s not like we’re _not_ all hoping they’re actually making out, the tension is getting super thick there. Romelle and Coran and the Holts made popcorn.”

Lance snorts. “Fair.”

“You may have broken a Guinness record for most people passive-aggressively love-confessed to in one moment.”

Lance laughs, a little frayed. “Well, I did always want to set a record and all the good ones are taken.”

“Allura and Krolia seem to be off having a Serious Conversation of some sort. Dunno why she went with Krolia, maybe she needs super serious spy mom time or something.”

“…good,” Lance says quietly. “I’m glad someone’s with her. I mean…okay, she already knew her side of it, because the mice are as bad as you. Never tell things to mice, Hunk.”

“I don’t tell anyone my secrets. Also Allura has eyes and a brain.” Hunk shrugs. “Just to set things straight, that was a Guinness record of three, right? You’re not in love with all of us?”

“Uueehhh?” Lance says. “Far as I know? Look, I have sixty two million feelings these days and I don’t know what they’re gonna do. I wouldn’t even be surprised if I fell for Romelle, she’s cute and badass and has awesome hair. Or you. You’re the only sane person here and your biceps are the size of my head and you cook. You’re going to make some rock a great wife someday. Or some gremlin. Whichever.”

Hunk snorts. “I love how you think I’m sane. This is how you know we _don’t_ have a weird psychic bond.”

“Eh. Saner than Shiro?”

“Well, that’s a low standard.” Hunk frowns. “Not that he isn’t incredibly damn functional, but he’s not sane, I think we’ve known that since day one.”

“God,” Lance groans, and hugs the tupperware harder. “He really shouldn’t have to deal with my bullshit right now. Nobody should have to deal with my bullshit right now. Keith can fix everything by breathing on it and has a space wolf, he can deal with my bullshit, except he probably wants to kill me.”

“I honestly can’t say one way or another. Like he huddled with Allura for a bit and then went into Black with Shiro.”

“Shiro and Keith sitting in a lion,” Lance sing-songs hopefully.

“Fucking _please_ ,” Hunk groans, then studies him for a moment. “I am starting to think this weird psychic bond thing is messing with you.”

“I have all of Shiro and Allura’s nightmares and also have to live with the hours Shiro spends staring at Keith’s mullet and also I’m kind of the walking dead and also both of them decided that the best way to deal with it is to never talk about it and pretend it isn’t happening so yeah this weird psychic bond thing is messing with me and I can’t even do anything about it?”

“Oh, jeez.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s rough, buddy.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want a hug?”

“Yeah.” It’s not much more than a croak.

For a moment, nothing happens. Kaltenecker lows softly.

“You realize you’re going to have to stop hugging dinner,” Hunk says.

“…oh.”

 

* * *

 

Allura sits on a flat stone, a fair ramble from the lions, watching a hot blue sun set in a spectacular mirage of color and feeling cold and hollow and thoroughly useless.

Krolia is the sort of person, she’s discovered, who can let a silence stretch without fuss. Even after somebody’s unloaded the whole mess of a misbegotten psychic link upon her. Allura’s throat feels a little dry, and she isn’t quite sure if the tall, lanky Galra woman sitting beside her is judging her or not. And yet, still, there’s a profound lack of fuss.

“Humans,” Krolia says eventually, “are an unusually emotional people. Certainly compared to what I’m used to. And highly social, and very verbal. Sharing their feelings, even sharing their pains and troubles, is a key part of what bonds them together, and without those bonds they wither. Even just the act of telling another what’s on their mind can soothe them, even when it’s also profoundly uncomfortable. It can be paradoxical like that.”

“I thought it would help Shiro,” Allura says quietly, feeling the regret sink like a cold stone in her belly. Another to add to the collection. “He was so revolted by the bond, so…frightened, I think, of what we might learn, how it might change what we think of him.” She closes her eyes. “I…didn’t think it would weigh so heavily on Lance.”

“These things are rarely straightforward,” Krolia says, almost kindly.

“Do you…think Alteans are so different from that?”

“No.” Krolia lets the silence hang for a moment, calm and inviting. “If you wish to speak, I will listen. It is no trouble. If you do not, I will take no offense.” An almost invisible smile touches her face. “Though Keith says I’ve become a good listener. And that he values you as family.”

Something cracks in Allura’s chest, watery and entirely too intense, and she has to bury her face in her hands for a moment as she remembers how to breathe.

 

* * *

 

There’s another knock on Red’s nose.

Lance jolts, puts down the _Monsters & Mana_ rulebook. That is how he knows he’s hit rock bottom—he’s reading a nerd rulebook for fun. Not even just the thief parts.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Keith,” comes Keith’s voice over the speakers.

Lance feels cold dread settle in his gut. Cold, resigned dread. The sort of emotion one feels upon hearing one’s full name from one’s mom.

Time to stop putting this off.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, and opens Red’s ramp.

Keith comes slowly up the ramp, wearing some stoic Keith expression that Lance can’t read at all, and barely even reacts to the whole cow situation except to touch Red’s wall, once, lightly.

Right—this is probably the first time he’s been in Red since he stepped up as Black after Shiro’s disappearance.

No—death.

Yikes.

Lance lets him have his moment, and mostly just sits, quietly, straightening in the pilot’s seat without meaning to.

“Can I ask you some stuff?” Keith says finally, voice still unreadably neutral.

Lance blinks, totally caught off balance. He had _absolutely_ expected a chew-out. “Uh…sure?”

“How did you know?” Keith jams his hands in his pockets and looks solidly anywhere but at Lance. “About Shiro, I mean. Was it your bond?”

“Yeah. He was kinda leaking pining all over me, it was…” Lance swallows. Sometimes you gotta own up even if there isn’t a chew-out. “I was frustrated, so I got stupid. And it was none of my business. I’m sorry.”

“Sometimes,” Keith says slowly, “you have to say things, I think.”

“Still none of my business.”

“Mm.” Keith’s quiet for a moment, and then says, “What you said about loving everybody.”

Lance winces. “Running off at the mouth. I was in a snit. Doesn’t mean anything.”

Keith’s brows knit, and he lifts his head to look Lance dead in the eye. “Is that. True?”

Lance falters, feeling his face heat. Keith’s glare has gotten _really_ dangerous these days. He drops his gaze, and that’s when he notices the purple mark at the base of Keith’s throat, mostly hidden by his jacket collar. Not the kind of purple mark you get in a fight. “Oh man,” he says, breaking out into a grin. “Wouldn’t have thought Shiro was the hickey type.”

“What—” Keith blinks, then hisses between his teeth, lifts his hands to the sides of his jacket as if he wants to tug them tighter, then drops them like he’s thought better of it.

“So you guys _did_ finally make out.” Lance’s grin broadens. “Aww yeah!”

“Damn it, Lance,” Keith mutters. “That’s not what I was asking.”

“Sorry, couldn’t hear what you were asking over the sound of no more dealing with you mooning at each other—“

“Why are you _like_ this?”

There’s enough of an edge to it that Lance stills, forces a breath. “Like what?”

“Like—first you apologize and say it was none of your business, and then you’re teasing me when I ask a serious question, and I just.” Keith stops mid-sentence, snapping his mouth shut so fast his teeth click, and looks like he’s counting to ten. “I can’t tell if you’re jerking me around. I’ve never been able to tell if you’re jerking me around.

Lance’s chest clenches. “I’m. Not.” He swallows hard. Keith deserves—shit, Keith probably doesn’t _actually_ want him to be honest, but if he’s gonna go pick a fight with _Shiro_ of all people about what Keith deserves, he needs to step up. “Or I. Don’t mean to.” He can’t meet Keith’s eyes. Just kind of looks at the floor and bares his throat. Figuratively speaking. “I’m just avoiding some stuff because I’m freaking out.”

“Oh,” Keith says. Then, “Sorry.”

It’s blunt and frank like nearly everything he says when he’s not on a ragebender, and to be fair, Lance hasn’t actually seen Keith go on a ragebender in…a while. Maybe because he hasn’t seen much of Keith at all in a while. Shit, is he still upset the whole disappearing off to the Blade and never writing and never calling thing? Okay, he probably is.

“Lance, I,” Keith starts, then stops, frowning. “Damn it, I suck at this.”

“At what,” Lance says. “Like I feel like I should say nah you don’t, but I’m not even sure what you’re trying to do.” He feels his mouth twist. “I kind of expected you to chew me out. I know you don’t suck at that normally but this is not the most organized chew-out ever.”

Keith’s frown gets a bit—sadder? “I’m not going to chew you out. Also you shouldn’t say I don’t suck at something unless I actually don’t suck at something, it’s no good otherwise.”

“Okay, fair enough. Henceforth you must earn Lance McClain Says You Don’t Suck stamps.”

“Good.”

“Right. So.” Lance steadies himself for a moment, looking Keith up and down. “What are you trying to do and why are you here giving me sad eyes when you could be making out with Shiro?”

Keith looks a bit disgruntled at the last part. “I’m trying to ask how you’re doing.”

Lance stares at him for a moment, completely taken aback. “What…why now?”

“Because.” Keith stops, and looks a little—

—scared.

Lance has to stop and reel for a moment. Keith’s scared. To talk to him. What the hell?

“Because I’ve been away,” Keith says. “And it’s been a long time for me. And I don’t know what’s been going on with you, or where I stand with you, or wh—” He stops, restarts. “How much I’ve hurt you. And this whole thing made me realize that just pretending that we were gonna be the same as before wasn’t working very well. And that you’re going through stuff I don’t really know about. So…if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to, like just say so. But. I want to understand what’s up with you, if I can.”

Lance stares at him for a long moment, mouth slack.

Then presses his palm to Keith’s shoulder and makes a _k-chunk_ sound effect.

“The fuck,” says Keith.

“It’s a Lance McClain Says You Don’t Suck Stamp.”

“Oh,” says Keith, voice a little soft.

Lance lets out a very deep breath. “Okay. I. Uh. It means a lot that you’re asking. Seriously. It also means a lot that you’re not pissed at me, I don’t actually want you to be pissed at me. There’s also…a lot. And most of it is either really stupid and embarrassing or not actually my problems and I just sort of get stuck with leakage. I’m doing okay except for feelings, like I really am. If you tell me feelings are important, I’m gonna check for pods.”

Keith gets that slightly sad look again and hunches a little. “They…are, though?”

“You haven’t hurt me.”

Keith un-hunches a little, and maybe somewhere under all the stoic, that’s relief.

“I’m still…I think I’m still pissed about the whole go off to the Blade and never write and never call phase. It’s not really fair, but I am.”

“I was under radio silence for some of that. But…the rest is fair.” Keith’s quiet for a moment, but before Lance can line up something else to say, he says, “I didn’t think you guys would want to hear from me after I kept jerking you around when I was running missions for both Voltron and the Blade. Or after all my mistakes being leader. I’m not used to getting second chances, and I was…in a bad place. And I never know what to say over the phone anyway.” It’s all frank, kind of calm. “That’s not excuses. Just…context, I guess.”

“Shit,” Lance says after a moment, heart aching. “I thought you were just off being too cool for school again, or…” He stops himself.

“Or?”

“Never mind. I…know you care about us. Teleporting across the universe to save our sorry asses from Lotor kind of drove that home, even if you’re bad at showing it.”

Keith actually smiles at that, small and quiet. It reaches his eyes. Lance is completely unprepared for the rush of sheer affection he feels. _His_ , he’s pretty sure. Not Shiro’s. Shiro is…

He pauses.

Shiro is walled off, hard and cold. Like way more so than usual.

“Hey, weird question—is Shiro okay?”

Worry drives away that smile as fast as it came. “I…think so? He said he wanted to turn in early. Some…some things got heavy. The kind of heavy that’s better once it stops hurting. I think. Why do you ask?”

“He’s just…really locked down right now. More than he usually is.”

“Do you want to go check on him?”

Lance chews his lip. “Maybe you should.”

“Together, then.”

 

* * *

 

There’s a flat spot between the Black Lion’s wings.

It’s a hell of a climb, and a hell of a view, and remarkably hard to see from the ground. Even from the other lions. Allura’s breathing a little hard by the time she gets to the top, following the thread of Shiro’s energy from their link.

He’s sitting cross-legged. Stiffens when she gets within sight, and slowly relaxes.

He’s a black wall over the link, shut down harder than she’s ever felt. There had been profound relief there for a while. Then excitement. Then grief, and a whole host of other things that were hard to pick out from Lance bubbling miserably off in his corner. Then a grim lockdown.

Not what she’d hoped to feel if he and Keith were finally talking it out.

“Allura,” he says carefully as she gets within conversation range. “How are you doing?”

“Well enough, seeing as I wasn’t involved,” Allura says. It’s not _exactly_ true. Krolia may or may not have bluntly called her on her own tendency to hide from her feelings, amongst many other things that came out in that watery mess. But either way, this isn’t the time for that. She settles carefully on some ridge of metal. Not too far, not too close. “And you?”

Shiro’s mouth twists. “I can’t tell if that means I’ve been successful or not.”

“At hiding your emotions from us?”

He nods.

“I can’t feel much. But the extend to which you’ve locked yourself down is a little alarming.”

Shiro sighs and closes his eyes. “I…need to.”

“What’s going on?” Allura asks, as gently as she possibly can, and hopes she won’t have to wheedle.

For a moment, it seems like she might, and then Shiro says, almost entirely calm, “I’m _furious_ with Lance.”

“I can think of any number of reasons to be,” Allura says cautiously. “May I ask which ones?”

“It’s unfair,” Shiro says, without answering. “Consciously or no, I’ve been using him as a…as a dumping ground. For things he should never have to deal with. He’s in an untenable position. Absolutely untenable. I shouldn’t be surprised that he snapped in one way or another.”

“There…could have been worse ways. But there could have been better.”

“Allura. He’s my _teammate_ and I can’t stop hurting him. And when he reacts to it, I get angry. What kind of—what kind of person _does_ that?”

“Somebody who values his privacy and his self-determination. Lance is…hurting.” She plows through the gnaw of guilt in her own belly at that. “He also violated both of those things. The one does not cancel out the other.”

Shiro is quiet for long enough that she starts to worry before saying, finally, “I should’ve had the guts to tell Keith myself.”

“I…can’t say I disagree with you, to be honest.” She chews her lip. “Lance had fussed at me about this before. I’d warned him to back off.”

“He’s…not always good at that,” Shiro says, a bit dry.

“…no. Especially when he’s emotional, and especially when he thinks he’s helping.”

“I just don’t understand why he.” Shiro stops himself. “There are far more stressful things in my mind than _that._ ”

Allura should say something reasonable and only partially true, like that Lance felt like he could _do_ something about that when he’s so helpless in the face of all Shiro’s trauma. Instead, what comes out, because Shiro is so _dense_ , is, “You realize he wasn’t just talking about me and Keith when he said he loves everyone, don’t you?”

Shiro freezes. Then says, smaller and hoarser than she’s ever heard him, “Fuck.”

The feelings splashing over the link are _jarring_. Not embarrassment, not even shock, but a gut level sense of _wrongness_. Profound confusion. Fear.

Allura almost reaches for his hand before thinking better of it.

“Shiro,” calls a voice. “It’s me. I’m with Lance.”

Keith. He’d warned Shiro before just popping into his line of sight. Considerate.

Shiro still jolts like he’s been hit with Pidge’s bayard, and Allura can hardly blame him. Especially given what they’d walked in on.

Lance looks stunned, slack-jawed, so she’s guessing that they’d heard. Keith looks between him and Shiro, once, then to her, brow furrowed in something like confusion.

Shiro half-turns to look at Lance, stricken.

Lance brings up a shaky semblance of a laugh. “That bad, huh. Okay. I can go, we were just worried about you.”

“Why,” Shiro asks, voice frayed, and Allura just _knows_ somehow that he’s not asking about the worry. Lance probably does too. Shiro’s black wall has cracked and they’re all rubbing raw against each other.

“You,” Lance starts, face crumpling a little. He looks like he’s wrestling with sevenfold math before he croaks, “You shouldn’t need to ask.”

“Yeah,” Keith says, very quietly. “But he does.”

Lance keeps staring at Shiro, breathing a little fast, until he finally says, “Okay. Right. Super-embarrassing dumb stuff I didn’t tell you last time. Coming right up.” He licks his lips once, blows out a breath, and drops Shiro’s gaze.

Something unhitches in him. Allura can feel it like a blown-out sigh over the link. Surrender.

“So once there was this dumb kid who drove speedboats even though he wasn’t old enough to and thought rocket ships were neat and planes were neat but also did I mention dumb and from a backwater island and wasn’t going to have a future except for driving speedboats legally and seeing how many tourists he could make puke and that was me. Making the tourists puke was very important. Fuck tourists.” Lance is speaking all in one low rush. “And then in one of the videos they stuck on at school there was this tall guy in a uniform talking about the space missions he’s been on, and how it’s the future of mankind and super-important for science and all that jazz, and okay looking back on it now that I know you, you looked kind of awkward like you do sometimes when you’re speaking on script, but you were basically the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Doing videos about space to inspire the kids or whatever, but. I-it worked. I looked up everything you’d ever done. And I finally knew what I wanted to do with myself. Took, uh, it was a hell of a lot of work getting my grades up, I kept your poster over my desk, that was the only way I was gonna, well, I didn’t need that asshole comms guy to tell me I was in to meet some quota or another, but I got in.”

Some of Shiro’s horror has drained away in sheer surprise. “I…I had no idea they even screened those in Cuba…”

“Yeah. They uh, they did. You…you changed my life before we even met. I mean, Hunk probably told everybody about the poster because he’s a helper like that, but it. It was more than…” He stops, scrubs a hand over his face, and plows on. “Then I thought you were dead, and then you were there and, and strapped to a table and stuff, and I didn’t know what was going on, not really, but I wanted to help you. You’d changed my life, you were my hero, I wanted to give back even a little, you know? And I was some kid you didn’t even know and you’d been through hell and there wasn’t anything I could do. I wanted to be able to be by your side, to be somebody you could rely upon, somebody you could respect even a little. I wanted to see you smile again and laugh again and live and be happy. Still do. And I know you _can_.” His voice cracks, just a little. “I…I think I get some of…the thing where you feel…” He waves a hand, vague and jerky. “But it’s not what we see. It’s not all there is to you.”

Shiro swallows hard, once, twice, thick with emotion. “Lance…”

“And _you_ ,” Lance croaks, turning his gaze to Keith, like he can’t actually manage to look in Shiro’s direction anymore. “ _You_. Do you remember that stupid cross-track double-chance all-pilots tournament thing?”

“Uh.” Keith blinks. He doesn’t seem angry at all, neither jealous nor territorial. Perhaps stunned. Allura’s a little relieved at that, at least. Even if she’s still waiting this out with anxiety gnawing in her gut. “Which one?”

“The last one before you…” Lance makes another vague hand motion, this one fluttery.

“I…guess? Ryu-sensei’s physics class was kicking my ass that term, I was mostly distracted by that.”

Lance breaks in a scattered laugh that sounds like it might be one step away from a sob. “Oh. Oh you were, now? Of course you were. Fucking hell. Of course you were. Why would _you_ need to worry about tournaments.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “So there were all these rumors that if any of the cargo pilots placed really well in that, they might move us to fighter track. I don’t even know to this day if it was true, but that tournament was like. The only thing that mattered. It was my _lifeline_ , man. And there was an odd number of students for it, so not everything got properly randomized for the first brackets, and. And I flew against you first. Both times.”

Keith continues to look entirely nonplussed that Lance is bringing this up now. Occasionally casting Shiro concerned looks. “Did you?”

“Yeah,” Lance says, high and frayed. “Yeah, I did. And of _course_ you kicked my ass. Total humiliation. Knocked me out first round, no chance to advance. First time I figured, I was all like, okay, I know how this goes. I’ve met my challenger. I work hard, up my game, come back, beat you by the skin of my teeth, shake on it, then we’re friends, that’s how it’s supposed to go, right? Second round. I give it…everything, everything I could’ve given. You beat me by sixty-two points and walk away. And then drop out. Looking back on it, I had the stupidest crush on you, too, I’m pretty sure. Not that I realized it, I still thought I was straight then, you just would go by with your _cheekbones_ and your _shoulders_ and I’d feel all weird and hot and get pissed at you for making me feel stuff, and you still didn’t even know who I was, I was—I was nobody.”

It’s Keith’s turned to be stunned into silence, just as Shiro had been, and this time Lance holds up a hand.

“Nah, zip it, I _know_ you had no idea. I was such a dick to you back when Voltron started, I just, you deserve to know why. _God_. You were everything I wanted to be and I hated you so much, and then, and then…” Lance voice turns small, earnest. “And then I was your Red. And it was…it was good. I thought we were maybe finally friends, even if I was never gonna be as good as you. And then you leave and there’s just this _hole_ and I. I missed you. And I tried to be Shiro’s Red for you, but I couldn’t. I can’t be where you are, I can’t be who you are, and you can’t see it either, neither of you can see how amazing you are…”

“I’m sorry,” Keith says, barely audible, and Lance holds up a hand.

“And it isn’t actually about whether I’m good enough. That’s…that’s the part I probably keep sounding like an asshole about, because it all kind of tangles in with the thing where everyone on this team is a freaking genius about something and then there’s me, and the thing where I couldn’t come through for you.” He jerks his head vaguely in Shiro’s direction. “And the thing where you like fixed everything by breathing on it while I was useless.” He jerks his head back at Keith. “But I know it’s not something I can earn. You two are mad for each other, that’s how it is, and that’s…that’s _good_ , it’s so good, you’re so good.” He smiles, bright and lopsided. “What can I say, you both have fantastic taste.”

There’s a few long moments of silence, and before either Keith or Shiro can scrape themselves together, Lance turns, weary and earnest. “Please tell me I don’t need to give you a why I love you speech too, I don’t know if I’d ever be able to stop.”

“Oh, Lance,” Allura sighs. Something’s aching inside her. She can’t quite untangle whether it’s her or him. “You must admit, I don’t have nearly as good taste.”

Lance snorts, startled into laughter in spite of everything. “Never did like eggplant.”

Shiro makes a noise like a dying cat. _Keith_ actually laughs a little.

“Eggplant?” Allura asks, lost.

“It’s a vegetable,” Keith says. “Purple and gross.”

“Oh.” Allura can’t help a bit of a giggle. Gross is—a wretched, abominable understatement, but _still_. “Eggplant. Yes. I see.”

“Well uh.” Lance hunches, practically turtling into his hoodie. “There it all is. Should I, uh. Go.”

The ache turns into a wrench at that. “No,” Allura says, without hesitating. Nobody should have to go be alone after hopelessly showing three people their naked bloody heart. “Or—at least stay with me. Come here.”

She opens her arms.

He crumples against her without quite meeting her eyes, face in her shoulder, and she wraps him up gently as he starts to shake a little.

Keith and Shiro are having a conversation in glances, slow and thoughtful, and eventually Keith drifts within range and their hands tangle together.

“Did you…know any of that stuff?” Keith asks quietly. They’re barely audible. Allura doubts Lance can make it out, not buried in her arms; she has to strain her ears.

“Not…like that. Not the details. Not the…intensity. Just that there was some…personal complex about each of us. He didn’t want to talk about it, so I didn’t press him.” Shiro’s quiet for a moment. “You?”

“Nothing,” Keith says, like it’s obvious. “I…think we’ve both been assholes to each other.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, very small and tired.

“He’s not wrong to love you, you know,” Keith says after a long silence. “You deserve it.”

“Fuck,” Shiro breathes, and turns his face into Keith’s side.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, had to fill in the tail end of this chapter, we're getting out of stuff I had completed before s7 dropped. Updates are no longer going to be once a day, sorry.

Shiro feels like he’s come off an emotional roller coaster. Hung over, dazed. It lingers through the morning, and as they crawl across some new vast and vast expanse of space, he starts to feel like there’s a volcano stirring in his chest.

Some of the daze, he thinks, is leaking over from Lance. The poor kid’s drained dry, settled into a distant calm that might, he hopes, be the beginning of him getting some real life back into him. It feels _wrong_ to see Lance this serious, this dragged down.

He’s also not a kid anymore. He’s grown—so much. Almost as much as Keith, even if he doesn’t realize it.

Shiro spends a long while sitting on the floor with his head on the wiry warmth of Keith’s thigh as he flies. Krolia has again made herself scarce—it seems more pointed this time. She’s with Hunk—god only knows what they’re talking about, maybe Galra culture. Coran has taken the day with Lance, for which Shiro is glad. They’ve always had a rapport.

As the day wears on, the volcano in his chest cools, hardens, into a strange and painful certainty. He knows what he needs to do.

He and Keith don’t talk much, but it’s comfortable. Sometimes Keith will let one hand stray down from the control bars, rest on his shoulder. At some point in the afternoon, out of nowhere, he asks quietly, “Do you think it will hurt Lance? That we’re. Together.”

_Together_. Shiro lets his one hand settle along Keith’s calf, and breathes, and says, eventually, “It’s probably bittersweet for him. But…we both know how much he wants it.”

It’s probably ten minutes until Keith asks, “Is that normal?”

They haven’t spoken of anything else, and Shiro knows exactly what he’s asking. It’s _eerie_. Last night he’d been panicking at the thought of letting this finally happen. Now—it feels like they’ve been together for months. Just like that. Comfortable. “I don’t think there’s a normal for this kind of thing. But…it happens, I think, that somebody gets invested in somebody else getting together. And I think it’s a good sign. It means he’s becoming somebody who.”

Shiro stops, suddenly, because he realizes all the meaning in what he was about to say.

“Shiro?” Keith asks eventually.

Shiro closes his eyes. “Somebody who seeks the happiness of those he loves, instead of only seeking them.”

Keith’s hand tightens on his shoulder, just a little. “So…is this happiness then?”

“Yeah.” Shiro swallows around a sudden lump in his throat. “I’m sorry I was being too fucked up to realize it.”

“It’s okay,” Keith says, with the patience of somebody who waited two years on a whale’s back to finish a single mission. “I’m just glad it’s good.”

The day stretches. They camp late that night. Dinner’s instant from Hunk’s supplies, and then he and Pidge put their heads together with Coran and Krolia on some project, and Shiro screws his courage to the sticking point and makes his feet move where they need to go.

“Lance, Allura…could we go talk?”

“Of course,” Lance blurts, gangling nervously to his feet. Allura follows suit, murmuring an apology to Romelle, who takes it with relative grace.

“I could give you another combat lesson if you like,” Krolia says, without looking up.

Romelle lights up and bounds to her feet.

“Should I,” Keith starts.

“You too,” Shiro says, squeezing his hand.

“If we want privacy in the sky,” Lance says, “Red’s head is a much easier climb. Man, Black’s _huge_.”

Keith snorts. “What, too full for mountain climbing?”

Lance elbows him lightly, like nothing’s changed, like he hadn’t spilled his guts last night. “And we spend the whole time hauling our sorry asses up and down and have no time for super important Shiro talking. C’mon.”

They encamp on Red’s haunches, because that’s far enough and, in fact, nobody feels like climbing the rest of the way.

“So,” Allura prompts. “What is it?”

Shiro forces himself to take one deep breath. Just words. One after another. “I think I need to take a page out of Lance’s book. There are…things I want to try to explain. About why I’m taking all of this so badly.” No. That was hedging. “Why I…have trouble accepting why someone might care for me.” Better.

“Shiro, you…” Keith starts.

“Don’t have to,” Lance continues, fumbling.

“If you don’t want to,” Allura finishes, voice soft.

“I…think I do. Well. I’d be lying if I said I wanted to wholeheartedly. But I want you to understand. And…there’s a good chance any of you might learn things about me regardless, things I’d wanted nobody else to know. So. At least this way I have some control over it.”

“Ah,” says Keith, like he gets that much. And he probably does.

“If I had known it would be heavy talk, I’d’ve raided Hunk’s green space chocolate stash on the way up,” Lance says.

“We can raid it after,” Allura points out.

“Yesss.”

Keith folds Shiro’s hand in both of his and sits next to him and waits.

Shit. Now he actually has to _do_ this.

Easier. Start somewhere easier. Work up to the truly wretched things.

“I…blew my last serious relationship.” He chews on his lip for a moment. “When I told people about the breakup, they got all angry. Said that he was in the wrong, that you should never give an ultimatum like that.” He nods vaguely in Lance and Allura’s directions—they hadn’t been ground zero for that like Keith had. “My career—the Kerberos mission—or him. But there was a lot leading up to that. He had every right to be frustrated. To want more time with me, to want me to prioritize my physical health. From different perspectives, we were both selfish, but I was…I couldn’t prioritize love. Not like that.”

“The ALS,” Lance breathes, shaky.

Shiro freezes for a moment.

Right. _All_ his videos. Probably read his Wikipedia page—not that it was that informative. It had come up more than once. Especially with the Stephen Hawking legacy.

“Yes,” he manages.

“ALS?” Allura murmurs.

“It’s a neurological disorder. Tremors, muscle atrophy, paralysis, eventual death. There’s not a cure on Earth. Palliatives, but. At the time, I had five, maybe ten years, if I was lucky. And Garrison spaceships don’t have artificial gravity, and prolonged zero-G exposure would speed up the atrophy.”

“Oh gods,” Allura whispers. She’s got both hands clasped over her mouth, and something in Shiro’s belly knots—why is she this worried, he’s not even gotten into the real problems. “Are you still…”

“No,” Shiro says, a little hurried. “Whatever else I can say for Haggar’s experiments, she fixed it. Both in my original body and this one. It’s not a problem anymore. Though it’s…hard, sometimes, to stop planning like I’m on a timer.”

“Okay, no, your ex was still being a dick,” Lance says. “I am of course completely unbiased in every way.”

“I know, right,” Keith mutters.

“Not really the point,” Shiro says awkwardly. “But that’s. Even before everything else, I’m not exactly the best at relationships.” He sees Keith starting to say something, so he keeps going—because that, of all things, needs to be in private later, because Keith is probably going to say he’d never do anything like that, and it’s occasionally _terrifying_ how far he’ll go for him. “And then there’s…everything else.” He gestures vaguely at himself, and fumbles for what to go into next, because he’s not ready for the big purple elephants in the room. Nobody is. “I’m…maimed. Scarred.”

“Rugged,” Lance puts in promptly.

“ _Lance_ ,” says Allura.

“What. He is.” Lance looks back to him. “You are. I mean, do any of us not have gnarly scars at this point?”

Allura looks _slightly_ sheepish. “I’ll catch up!”

“And it’ll look badass when you do,” Lance says without a hint of hesitation. “Okay, Shiro…I get that it’s kinda different for you, but…”

“No, I. I know.” He steps aside from explaining just _why_ some of his scars make him so unsettled in his skin. The brands. The surgical lines from experimentation, vivisection. Again, later, in private. Keith will see that godawful roadmap. “What you see isn’t what I feel. That’s mostly just…cognitive dissonance.” He laughs, short and wry. “I’m warming up here, okay.”

“Fair,” says Lance. “Dude. Fair.”

Keith squeezes his hand.

“I’m still processing my clone’s memories,” Shiro goes on, voice quieting. “He…nearly murdered all of you.”

“Were you…was he aware?” Allura asks. “After he turned on us?”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, a little raw. “Like a…passenger in his own body. He was trying so hard to hold back. I don’t know if it did anything, but…”

“It must have,” Lance says, with such surety that Shiro can’t help but stare at him for a moment. “I mean, I’m _alive_?” he blurts as evidence. “I’m not Galra or Altean or Hunk. You could snap me like a twig. I _am_ a twig.”

Shiro is quite sure that Lance didn’t _mean_ to plant the mental image quite so vividly. As if he hasn’t had enough dreams of Lance dying. As if he hasn’t had that exact nightmare. Probably passed it on to one of them too. “Never,” he whispers, fervent.

“I know.” Lance blinks. “I _know_. Seriously, I trust you.”

Something warm and watery and uncalled-for runs through Shiro’s gut at that.

“That wasn’t you,” Keith says, absolute. “That was Haggar and Haggar alone.”

“I…know,” Shiro manages. “In my head, I know. I still feel all his guilt. That he didn’t fight it harder, that he didn’t find a way to communicate what was happening. It…ate him alive. It’s been a lot to process.”

“Sometimes,” Lance says slowly, “even if you know something, it doesn’t quite…sink in right. And then you feel stuff and you’re like goddammit, I know better, but I’m still feeling this stuff and I don’t know how to make it go away.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, relaxing just a notch. “That.”

“Oh,” says Allura.

“Mm,” says Keith.

“Big mood?” says Lance.

“Big mood,” says Shiro.

Allura looks very distant for a moment, then says, “I wonder…”

Somebody makes a questioning noise after she trails off.

“Later, I think,” she says, folding her hands on her knees. “It’s another conversation and I want to let you finish.” She looks earnestly at Shiro. “If there’s more.”

“There’s…” Shiro nods, collects himself for a moment. “This isn’t my body. That bothers me sometimes. Sometimes I feel like a person, and sometimes I feel like a ghost wearing a dead man’s skin. It _fits_ , because we’re so similar, and sometimes that makes it stranger, and sometimes that makes it more comfortable. Mostly similar. I think Haggar…enhanced the clones a little.”

“Oh,” says Keith. “Yeah. You seemed stronger, faster, though it might’ve just been that you weren’t holding back. And most people would die of thirst in three, four days, maybe longer since you weren’t exposed to sunlight. Still. You were healthier than I’d think, after a week.”

Shiro tries not to shiver at the memory of that week, tries not to let the bone-deep chill show, but Keith squeezes his hand anyway. “It’s…subtle. Enough that I could think I was myself. But I probably am a bit tougher.” He squeezes back. “I’m. Beating about the bush.”

“Fair,” says Lance, again, but this time he lets out a shaky breath and drops Shiro’s gaze, bracing himself.

He—probably already knows. At least some. This is why he’s doing this, Shiro reminds himself, and Keith deserves to know, and.

“I have my clone’s memories. Like I said.” He swallows once, twice. “After the Kral Zera…Lotor had started to wonder, I suppose, why I was going so far to support him. He. My clone. He asked him to visit on the command ship. Implied that he wanted things, saw how far he would go to meet those desires, even though he. Even though he clearly. Didn’t want to.”

_Interesting_ , he’d said. _You can’t be one of the witch’s, can you? She would’ve already used you to destroy Voltron or thwart my plans. Not planted you as a convenient tool for her enemy._ Clawed hands dropping on his bare shoulder. _I shall have to keep an eye on you. I killed the last spy in my ranks. But the consequences—ahh, it would be difficult if Voltron turned on me now, would it not. I assume you’re incapable of explaining your predicament. Otherwise a noble paladin like you would have turned yourself in already. Well. This shall be our secret, shall it not? Good boy._

“Shiro,” Keith says quietly.

Shiro registers the red curve of the lion’s haunch with a long, slow shudder. “Shit.” He’d checked out. “Sorry. I don’t…have the conditioning, anymore, to not be able to talk about it, but.”

He forces a breath. Takes stock.

Lance has turtled into his hood. Allura is frozen where she sits, both hands clamped over her mouth, horrified. “Shiro…a-are you saying he…”

“Had sex with me to see if I could say no?” Shiro mutters in one breath.

Allura makes one wretched, wordless noise into her hands and doubles over, hiding her face in her knees. “Oh, gods. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“We didn’t kill him hard enough,” Keith whispers, with barely any air.

“Gotta admit,” Lance says, a little high and shaky, without picking up his head, “that was pretty much why I was voting for retrieving the body. The killing him hard enough part I mean. In general. I didn’t…”

Allura shudders.

“No, I get it, I get that there wasn’t time…shit, sorry.”

“It’s not,” Allura starts, strangled. “It’s just. It doesn’t matter.”

“Allura,” Shiro says, heart aching.

“I was falling for him.” Her eyes are wet when she picks up her head. “I _kissed_ him. I…I’ve been having these horrible dreams about him, and I thought it was just…just my shame. And he—and we didn’t even _know_ —”

“It’s not your fault,” Shiro says urgently. “It’s not.”

Keith’s scooted around a little so he’s facing Shiro’s side instead of just sitting next to him, and free his hand settles feather-light on his remaining bicep. Questioning.

“It’s okay,” Shiro murmurs, and wishes he had a second hand to put over his. Only one, still tangled with Keith’s. Shiro focuses on the warmth of his hand. Braces himself against the churning, abject guilt that Allura and Lance are bleeding in unison. _Horrible dreams_. So she’d felt that. Even if she hadn’t realized it. He can’t brace himself against what’s also inside him—churning, abject guilt.

Keith presses himself slowly against his arm, warm and small and solid.

He may as well get this over with.

“And it wasn’t just.” He stops, tried to figure out how to start again. “I’ve always…reacted strongly to Sendak. Even more than Haggar, even knowing what she did to me, Sendak…well, you felt it. I don’t remember very clearly. It’s blurry, I don’t know how much of it is my imagination, but…”

“It’s true,” Lance says from his hoodie, quiet and flat.

There’s one moment of horrible silence, and at least Keith and Allura are both looking at Lance instead, and Shiro has time to remember how to breathe after all his insides turned to ice.

“Well, either that or I’m having horrible dreams for absolutely no reason whatsoever and my subconscious deserves to be taken out and shot, but it’s probably.” Lance stops himself dead.

“Fuck,” Shiro breathes.

“Sorry,” Lance says, and uncurls with a jolt. He pulls his hoodie strings on the way, hiding half his face, mouth hanging open as he fumbles. “Really tactless. Apparently. Sorry.” He reaches out a hand, a little hesitant, like a peace offering.

Shiro slides away from Keith and drops to his knees and crushes Lance to his chest like one single arm could protect him from the entire universe and his own mind. “I was afraid you’d.” He swallows. “I didn’t know how to ask.”

Lance makes some choked noise, and wraps his arms very gently around Shiro’s shoulders, giving him plenty of time to shake him off. “M-me neither.”

There are footsteps, and Keith puts himself in Shiro’s line of sight before coming around on his right. Not getting between him and Lance. Putting himself there because he knows he’s the one Shiro trusts on his useless right. _God_ , Keith’s too good for him, and both of them are warm and close, and Allura is hanging back, stricken.

“That’s it for that,” Shiro says, voice and control a little frayed. “Far as I know. But I don’t think Haggar bothered to and I don’t think I ever really met Zarkon before so really only half of our most dangerous enemies have fucked me…”

“Shiro,” Keith says, sounding like he’s trying very hard to be calm. “You keep saying this like what was done to you changes what kind of person you are.”

Lance mumbles something into Shiro’s shoulder that might be agreement and squeezes him a little. Shit. Shiro’s hugging him hard enough that his shoulder’s clenching, and he loosens up and murmurs, “sorry, can you breathe,” because that’s easier than trying to give Keith an answer. Or trying to get into the real problem.

“Yeah,” Lance says, a little squeaky, and doesn’t let go. “Yeah, I can breathe, but…”

“No, I know.” He can’t avoid the harder things. “Keith’s right.” Shiro’s voice is low and shaky and doesn’t even sound right to his own ears. “They’re just, it was just all things that happened to me. Things that happened and moments in time, and it’s mostly.” He doesn’t have to look at any of them. He can hook his chin over Lance’s shoulder and look where nobody’s standing. “I never understood before why people would say damaged goods. Like it’s a—property crime. But now it…it doesn’t change who I am, but the damage is there, it’s a, a hazard, an obstacle. I don’t know how to get around it. I haven’t tried. I’ve probably been scared to try.”

He hadn’t planned on his voice catching on the last part. He isn’t used to admitting when he’s scared to his team, he supposes. Aura of leadership and all. No, he can’t abandon that entirely just because Keith’s the Black Paladin now. They still need that. But Keith’s always seen under his skin. Allura and Lance _feel_ under his skin now.

Keith settles a hand on the back of his shoulders, and Lance still hasn’t let go, and he isn’t sure where Allura is.

“It’s okay,” Keith says quietly. “However you want to get around it.”

Allura is hanging back, kneeling a little way from the bundle around Shiro, eyes downcast.

“The thing is,” Shiro says, and has to swallow through what feels like a stranglehold, because the rest was easy next to this. “It’s not just. There are the things that happened to me, and the things I did, and things that you do change what kind of person you are.” He can feel his heart pounding. Irrational, he tells himself. The fear’s thick, but it’s internal, purely internal. He doesn’t need to be checking over his shoulder, panicking like an off-shift guard is coming. He looks at a patch of the Red Lion’s hull and tries to breathe, and Lance keeps squeezing him, and that’s okay, that’s strangely okay, Lance is wiry and soft and fits perfectly inside one arm.

“What are you scared of?” Keith asks, still in that low, scrupulously calm voice.

Shiro freezes for a moment, and keeps staring at the hull, and forces another breath. “That you’ll…see me differently. That you’ll think I’m a.” Another breath. “A sham.”

“No,” Lance says, and it’s almost pleading.

There’s a rustle as she moves, then Allura’s hand touches Lance’s shoulder, just lightly. “I think,” she tells Shiro carefully, “that my judgement of your worth comes from everything I’ve seen you accomplish from the moment you became the Black Paladin. And I sincerely doubt whatever the Galra have forced you to do will change that. No more than your actions under Haggar’s control did.”

The strangling in Shiro’s throat loosens a little, and he nods, mute. Words are getting more difficult as he frays. This is—even harder than he thought it would be. They’re so accepting. Horrified, but accepting.

They could have figured this out, he told himself. They’ve been astonishingly forgiving and accepting in the past. His fear is irrational.

“I don’t…remember everything,” he starts, hedging. “But I know I fought in the arena for nearly a year. And they say…they say I was never defeated.”

He has to close his eyes, because he can’t risk Allura stepping into his field of view. He doesn’t know how he’d meet any of their eyes right now.

“From the bits I remember…sometimes I could get away with it. With stunning, or critically wounding, or…one time I think I actually shoved a guy right back out the arena doors. Not the—not the paid gladiators, not the ones who enjoyed it, who gloated. I was a _Garrison_ pilot, you know how that is. I’d skeet-shot drones. Never live targets. I hadn’t killed anybody before Myzax—well, I suppose I didn’t kill him after all. I thought I had, when they pulled him off.”

“The other slaves,” Keith says, still low, still calm.

Shiro nods, jerky, not opening his eyes. “They were like Matt. Like the prisoners we rescued. Terrified. They’d beg me sometimes. To spare them. Or—or for a quick death. Maybe after I started giving in, I don’t know. I remember I broke a girl’s leg once, trying to take her down to win the match. I hadn’t meant to. I didn’t know her species, didn’t know which way her knee would shatter. She—she begged me to kill her so she wouldn’t be taken to the druids, or die from bone rot, I could see her marrow, and I. I snapped her neck.”

Lance makes one wretched, strangled noise, and falls silent again. _Lance_. God. Shiro feels like he’s ripping open a gateway between two realities that should never touch, his past and these people, he’s violating his most fundamental principles again, backed into a corner again by circumstances beyond his control—

No. He clenches his hand. He needs to take responsibility. It was his mad choice to unload all of this in spite of how cruel it would be.

His hand?

Oh. He’s let go of Lance.

Keith’s warmth is still against his side.

Still not opening his eyes.

He needs to keep talking. Get to the point. Regain control. “I don’t know how many I killed for them. I don’t even remember what made me give in. The first time, all the other times. They starved me for a few weeks once, I think. I knew if I disappointed them too long, I’d die. But I—I gave in. I let them use me to kill. Again and again.”

“Did you have a choice?” Low and shaking a little. Keith.

“I could have let them kill me. I could have held out longer. Tried harder. I could always have tried harder. The thing—the thing is, Keith.” He can hear the urgency creeping into his voice. The need to make them understand _why_ the cracks they could stumble into go so far down. “I _gave in_. I’m not as strong as I want to be. As I want you to think I am. That’s why I feel like a sham. You think of me as a survivor, but I’m a…I’m complicit. And that’s just—that’s just feelings. I’m a murderer. Over and over. That’s just. That’s a fact.”

“It’s not your fault.” Faint, fervent. Lance.

“No. No. I made that choice. Even if it was between killing and dying, I still _made_ that _choice._ I can’t just pretend that I didn’t. That just because they put me in that position, it wasn’t my fault, my responsibility, how I acted? That’s—that’s one step away from claiming I was just following orders.”

“I’d say it’s several steps away.” A quiet, thoughtful murmur. Allura. “And there is a difference between fault and responsibility.” She’s silent for a moment, and Shiro doesn’t feel protests bubbling up in his throat this time. It’s almost a relief, to hear her accept this rather than pleading that it’s not as bad as he thinks. “I believe,” she says eventually, “it’s a sign of your profound integrity that you refuse to set aside that responsibility. Even when it causes you pain. A lesser man, a sham, would run from it. Claim that he was blameless because of the atrocities he’d been subjected to. But you…”

Her voice cracks.

“Allura,” Lance murmurs, and there’s another rustle. His hand in hers. Shiro feels like it might be true, without even opening his eyes, and will question how alarming that is later.

“I’m all right,” she says.

“None of us are all right,” Keith says, without any particular anger or grief. A simple statement of fact. “But we will be.” Another statement of fact. Like he’s just sure somehow. “Shiro.” His voice softens, and there’s a weight on the mostly-numb stump of his prosthetic which might be Keith’s forehead. “With a year of victories behind you, knowing the Galra? I kind of figured. If you’d wanted to, if you didn’t care…you know how much I hate bullies. But I _know_ you. I never doubted your heart. Not for a second. So this doesn’t change who you are to me.”

The cracks you can stumble into, Shiro thinks vaguely, and shudders, and falls.

“I love you,” Keith says, and kisses him on the cheek, almost too brief to notice.

Shiro’s eyes fly open in shock, and something warm and wet leaks out, which he does his best to ignore.

Lance and Allura are sitting in front of him, hand in hand, Lance a little closer. He’s stricken; she’s radiating gracious concern, like she’s already rolled up her horror about Lotor and tucked it away somewhere. Shiro flinches and looks away. He must look like an idiot, he thinks. Balking at his friends. Vulnerable.

“You’re,” Lance starts, and jitters in place, and Shiro isn’t sure whether he’s backed off out of revulsion, and then it hits him that Lance isn’t sure whether he let go of _him_ out of revulsion. “For…for what it’s worth, I always thought you were pretty much the strongest person I’ve ever known. Like I, uh, I’m only saying pretty much because she’s here.” He points his thumb over his shoulder.

“It’s no contest, really,” Allura says faintly.

“I know you expected different,” Lance goes on, voice small. “And I heard you, I-I heard all of it, I get what you’re saying, but…” He bites his lip, hard, and then meets Shiro’s eyes for the first time in a long while. “You’re here. You’re fighting and you’re living and you’ve done amazing incredible things, even after all of that, and. And it doesn’t change how I see you. You’re probably…even stronger than I realized.” He reaches for Shiro’s hand, tentative.

“Lance…” Shiro reaches back. Lets him take it. And doesn’t know what to say.

“S-so yeah,” Lance blurts, ducking his head. “Nothing’s changed.”

Then, rather quickly, he ducks further to peck the back of Shiro’s hand, feather-light.

All the breath leaves Shiro’s body at once, and Lance picks his head back up wide-eyed, already starting to withdraw.

Shiro squeezes his hand and doesn’t let go. He doesn’t know what to say, and he’s lost control of his face, and he wasn’t sure what he expected, but this wasn’t it. Hoped for, maybe, in the dim corners, but not expected. Right now he isn’t even sure why. What he’d been so afraid of. He also isn’t sure how this can possibly be happening.

“Nor has it for me,” Allura says quietly. “And I place no blame on you. That’s the simple answer, and it’s true.”

“I…didn’t ask,” Shiro manages.

“Response, then. That I feel a need to give for my own reasons, not because it was demanded. Especially as I am often…far too quick to judge and reject.” She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes like she’s putting something together. “But I also want to say. Knowing that you take that responsibility.” She opens her eyes, and her voice is a little slower than usual. Raw. “Love—of any sort—does not demand perfection, Shiro. It cannot.”

Shiro opens his mouth, like he should be managing to come up with some sort of response, but there’s nothing.

“You know how I loved my father,” Allura says, slow and measured. “And you know what mistakes he made, what disasters he invited. Without willing it, without desiring it, but as the consequences of his choices, he…created the empire as much as Zarkon did. Yet that does not change how I loved him, because he was…the word does not translate, truly. It’s not a matter of blood. It doesn’t have anything to do with the nature of the relationship, only the depth. Because he was one of those closest to my soul. My family. So…”

She scoots a little closer.

Shiro’s a little frozen, and Keith has made some tiny, tender noise—right, he’d told him once that when Allura had sorted out her fear and suspicion about his heritage, she’d called him her family. It had warmed Shiro’s heart even then. Now…

Now he was too distracted by the thought to notice that Allura has leaned in to kiss him on the forehead.

“This,” Allura says softly, pulling back, “is what I mean when I say nothing has changed.”

 

* * *

 

Allura gets sent as the ambassador to raid Hunk’s snacks—the things the humans call chocolate even though that’s not their proper name—because she’s not visibly crying, unlike either Shiro or Lance, and she’s not Keith, who’s refusing to let go of Shiro. Which are very fair reasons.

It gives her time to wonder why she had to kiss him with practically every step down to the Yellow Lion. And every step back.

Lance has lent Shiro his jacket to hide in as he sniffles, with a promise to run it through their sole surviving laundry pod as soon as possible. Keith squeezes her hand. They have chocolate. Shiro apologizes, they tell him where to put _that_ , they all eventually trickle off to bed. Far too emotionally wrung out to do anything more than that.

None of them, Allura is quite sure, are sleeping.

Which gives her even more time to wonder why in all seven black holes of hell did she had to kiss him. Generalized. Why in all seven black holes of hell did she have to kiss _anybody._

God. _Lotor_.

She locks even the mice out of her tiny slice of Blue Lion bunk, because nobody else needs to deal with her ridiculous self-pity in the wake of hearing somebody else’s profound struggles, and huddles in a wretched ball. _Lotor_. A rapist on top of it all. She hadn’t thought he could sink even lower, and yet. And yet she had _kissed_ him. And there’s not a damn thing she can do about it. Not a thing she can do except live with it and try to keep looking Romelle and Shiro in the eye.

She dozes off eventually, so tired she doesn’t even remember her dreams, which is, at least, a relief.

She wakes to find a little bundle of jars tied in a flowery rag and labeled in chickenscratch, all tucked inside Blue’s jaws with her name on a tag. Inside there’s face and body scrub, moisturizer, special lip scrub. All Altean-approved, according to the note. _Use it all if you like, you certainly don’t have to for my sake, but to be super-scientific, you can scrub off every cell of your body he ever touched if that’ll help at all._

In place of a signature, there’s a stick figure cow.

“Oh,” she breathes. He must have been up all night making this. Something in her chest clenches, and she gathers it all up with care.

 

* * *

 

Shiro spends the night curled close with Keith, shivering past the waves of emotion still pounding through him after all that. And eventually, in the dim light of their narrow bunk, he settles into a strange, profound calm. He peels off his shirt, lies there breathing as Keith traces the scars from the arena. The brands. The surgical lines from experimentation, vivisection. Duplicated onto his clone, but still—Keith _knows_ him and still doesn’t look at him with anything but love. It’s overwhelming. Somewhere in the back of his awareness, Allura wallows in doubt, and he’s too tired to even think of reaching out to her, and that bothers him, but Keith kisses his forehead and it fades.

He’d forgotten how good it feels to _touch_ somebody. Keith, wide-eyed, had never known at all.

There’s nothing sexual about it, really. Just hands on skin, acceptance. They drift off cuddled close in just their underwear, skin against skin, overwarm and achingly perfect. Shiro need not even fear waking with his arm burning into Keith’s flesh anymore. He’s breathing easier than he has in—years, probably.

“I love you too,” he whispers into the curls on the nape of Keith’s neck. “And…thank you. Thank you.”

In the morning, he finds a bundle tucked in Black’s jaws: jars wrapped in a white rag, tied with a tag with his name on it. Scar goo, face and body scrub, lotion, with labels and detailed instructions written in chickenscratch. And a card. _Scar goo is because I’ve been meaning to make you some since the facial party. The rest is so you can make sure there’s not a cell on your body they ever touched if you like._

In place of a signature, there’s a stick figure cow.

“Lance,” Shiro murmurs, taking it all in, genuinely a little stunned. He remembers the night before, the feather-light kiss on his hand, and it suddenly occurs to him that he means it. Lance really is at least a little bit in love with him. Unflinching. Not just a fleeting crush.

He has absolutely no idea what to do with this realization.

He tucks the jars into the Black Lion’s narrow bathroom. Maybe tonight, he thinks, there will be time to get Keith’s help with the scar goo. His face had felt much nicer after that evening. Fresh, smooth, less itchy.

He tucks the card into his mostly-empty bag of things instead of throwing it out, and he isn’t quite sure why.

He isn’t upset. Not upset at all. It’s strangely liberating to be this calm about it. Lance has feelings for him. But it’s okay. Normal. Not based on false pretenses, on a pedestal, on illusions. He doesn’t have to be alarmed. It’s awkward, perhaps. But manageable.

He goes down to breakfast, and Lance is yawning and leaning on Hunk’s shoulder, and Allura is sitting very close to Coran and very far from anybody else else. She doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

“Thank you,” Shiro tells Lance, quietly, as Hunk doles out his share.

Lance ducks his head, but it can’t quite hide the genuine, luminous smile.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIVE, THIS FIC LIVES. I was on vacation for a bit and then had like an entire week of not being able to concentrate to save my freaking life. Anywhere, here we go, it's Allura's turn for catharsis. I do have fair chunks of the next chapter written already, and actually maybe some idea of where I'm going with this, so I'm hoping this'll pick up again.

It’s not exactly a quiet day in the Blue Lion’s cockpit. Coran’s teaching Romelle _Mana: The Quickening,_ the two-person magic-battle spin-off of _Monsters & Mana_, and the mice are very distracted by all their whooping. Coran keeps placing all these stealth redirect traps, and every time Romelle gets toasted by her own spells, Allura learns a new local variation of increasingly convoluted declinations of _quiznak_ , and any other day she’d think it was delightful, really, but she’s tired. She’s tired and groggy and can’t stop thinking about her mistakes.

Shiro’s…emotionally hung over, perhaps, but peaceful. More peaceful than he’s been the entire time they’ve been linked. Allura _knows_ she shouldn’t focus on it, but it’s the only thing that eases the churning in her belly.

Lance is numb, and slow, and tired.

One of the things Allura keeps getting stuck on is the part where Lance _knew._ About that beast Sendak. It’s what she’d been afraid of, when she’d proposed what she had about the bond. That they’d be carrying each other’s painful secrets. She hadn’t quite thought through the consequences of that

But if she fusses about Lance having to carry a secret like that alone, would she not also fuss about Shiro?

Yet Shiro had kept the secret by choice, and Lance under duress—her duress.

Shiro had revealed his secrets…well, it was difficult to say how much by choice and how much by duress.

She has so much to set right by them both.

And she’s lost enough in thought, cruising in a straight line through deep space, light-years upon light-years from _anything_ , that she goes face-first into the console with a yelp when something bumps into her lion’s hull. Coran and Romelle shriek in a flutter of holographic cards and very solid mice.

“Lance,” Keith calls over the com channel. “Fall in.”

There’s some vague mumble from the Red Lion, and the video screen doesn’t come up. Lance is—beyond tired. Fast asleep, probably.

Allura shakes herself and gets a real grip on the control bars, pulling Blue out of her drift. “Let’s…let him sleep. Red’s small, and there’s no friction to slow us down. It won’t hurt to tow him.”

Keith frowns slightly, but doesn’t protest, at least not until Hunk’s face pops up. “Ooh, does that mean I can take a nap too? I can get behind this.”

“Yellow is not exactly small,” Pidge points out dryly—not that there isn’t tell-tale chittering music in the background of her call, and she’s forgotten to pull her tongue in from the corner of her mouth.

“Yeah but she’s right about momentum. Keith could just give me a head-butt and I could glide for an _hour_ , c’mon…”

Allura maneuvers, light and careful, to mantle over the Red Lion and settle her jaws gently on the back of its neck. A few bursts of thrusters to get the extra weight moving with her, and then they’re flying, Red dangling in Blue’s mouth.

“Not at the speeds we’re moving,” Keith says. “Allura, tow Lance for now. He can fly himself when he wakes up.” He narrows the channel, private between Black and Blue. “Do you think he’s okay?”

“Yes. Just…tired. I doubt he slept much last night.”

Keith looks over his shoulder for a moment, then says quietly, “I don’t think any of us did.”

“How’s Shiro?” Allura asks, taking that check to mean he’s not in the cockpit.

Keith sits in measured silence for a moment, eyes to one side, before answering. “Better, I think.” He closes his eyes. The Black Lion’s course stays rock-steady. “I don’t have the inside view, of course.” He speaks slowly, with care. “And I don’t know how much he remembered when, not all of it. But from where I’m standing, it’s seemed like things were festering for…a while. Last night hurt. Of course it hurt. But he needed it, and he’s happier.” He opens his eyes again. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” she lies, with all due grace.

Keith’s brows draw down, just a touch, but he lets it go.

The day drags on. Lance wakes with a wiggle of paws, squawks, apologizes a lot. It’s a long travel stretch until their next stop, and by the end of it they’re all yawning, but there’s still dinner to deal with. Allura’s not particularly hungry; there are other things gnawing in her belly.

She eats mechanically, then looks for them. Lance first. At least she has words for what she needs to say to him. She’s not sure if she _ever_ will for Shiro.

Lance is baggy-eyed and leaning against Red’s paw as he picks at his food, curled cross-legged. He’s usually a phenomenal eater, she’s noticed. Not that it seems to go anywhere but right through his lanky body.

“Lance,” she starts gently, settling near him. “How are you doing?”

“Ah, I’m fine.” He flashes her a semblance of a reassuring smile. “Well. Super embarrassed. That is not going to happen again. For _anyone’s_ sake, those are so not the comfiest chairs for sleeping.” He pats Red’s paw. “No offense. They’re the _best_ for piloting, man, the old sim chairs at the Garrison would stick into my back worse than that ratty old recliner Grampa never got rid of…oh. Uh. Did you get your present? Was it too much? I’m sorry if it was too much—”

“It was lovely, Lance,” she says without hesitation. “Thank you.” She takes a steadying breath. “I…owe you an apology.”

Lance’s patter drains into silence and he stares at her in open confusion. “For…for what?”

“When I suggested that we not act on what we learned through the link, I failed to consider the position that would put you in. Or to recognize how upset you were by it.” Obvious in hindsight. Another failure. “For that, I’m deeply sorry.”

Lance’s confusion doesn’t particularly abate. “You guys were who I was worried about.”

Allura blinks. “You mean…me and Shiro? Why?”

His mouth twists as he bites his lip. “‘Cause…’cause you were both bottling everything up. And I’ve always heard that wasn’t good for you.” He looks away. “I thought it was a terrible idea when you first said it, but Shiro liked it, so…”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Allura asks gently.

“Because you both.” He swallows, then restarts. “You’ve both…been through so much. And I’m just like a guy with a normal life except for the whole paladin thing. Nobody likes advice from the sidelines.”

Allura opens her mouth, closes it, and looks down at her hands. He might well be right. Would either of them have listened then?

“I think,” she says eventually, “that talking about what weighs on you is far more difficult and brave than managing it alone. And that I was wrong to prevent you from doing so because of my own cowardice.”

“Allura…you’re one of the bravest people I know.” Lance’s voice is low, frank. “Even by Voltron standards, which are pretty high.”

She isn’t even sure whether that’s some sort of covert encouragement to open up, or covert chastisement for not doing so—if you’re supposed to be so brave, Princess, then step up like they did. But no, this is Lance. There’s not much covert about him. “I’m trying to apologize to you,” she says, slightly pleading.

“I’m not mad at you?” His face scrunches a little. “The whole not talking about stuff rule is officially not a thing anymore, right?”

“Yes. I…as per Shiro’s comfort, of course, but I think so.”

“Then…apology accepted, I forgive you, it’s okay.” His face stays crumpled as he studies her, but differently now, brow creased with worry. “You’re…you’ve felt really messed up today.”

“You don’t look so bright yourself.”

Lance drops her gaze. “I’m just…tired. And things hurt that I can’t really do anything about.” A mess of secondhand trauma, Allura supposes, and a triple dose of unrequited love. And Shiro’s suddenly set them a very high bar for emotional honesty. “But you…something’s eating you.”

“Several things, probably,” she admits, voice a little small. “I.” Her voice dies in her throat, and she buries her face in her hands. “I feel,” she tries again, and stops.

There’s some shuffling as Lance scoots closer to her, and she curls against his side. Gods, he’s worn so thin. She should stop leaning on him. But she—

She doesn’t know who else to trust with this.

The thought leaves her reeling a little. How much she trusts him.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Lance mumbles.

“No, I…” She bites her lip. “It just feels so wretched to put it into words. So…self-indulgent.”

“Is _that_ why you bottle up so much?” Lance says, sounding faintly bewildered. “You can always come talk to Kaltenecker. It doesn’t matter how emo or dumb you sound in front of a cow, she’s a cow.”

“Yes, but her mammaries disturb me,” Allura sighs.

“They’re just…okay, never mind, I don’t think I will ever understand why Alteans are scared of cows.”

“I’m not _scared_ ,” she protests. Whines, maybe. Some of the crushing weight in her chest is easing somehow. Lance’s joking around _shouldn’t_ make it easier to trust him, and yet…

He settles an arm around her shoulders and asks, quietly, “Is it because of the eggplant?”

Allura chokes on a laugh. “ _Lance_.”

“What. Okay, look, I recognize that the scale of things he did is utterly horrific, but I’m also going to keep calling him an eggplant until somebody tells me not to because making fun of incredibly gross assholes who take themselves too seriously is satisfying.”

“That’s…quite sensible, I suppose. I just don’t have quite the, ah, visceral disdain of eggplant you seem to?”

“Imagine what you feel about cow udders except as a purple vegetable, I guess? A, uh.” One hand sketches a vague form in the air.

“Phallic purple vegetable?” Allura feels her nose wrinkling; Lance makes a faintly strangled noise, but doesn’t deny it. “That’s _awful_. I…that’s really quite appropriate.” Her nose wrinkles further. “I _kissed_ that,” she groans, slumping against Lance. “Thank you for the lip scrub, truly. That was very thoughtful.”

“I, uh…well, if I’d done anything like that, I’d want to exfoliate it away, so…”

“Have you…ever?”

Lance shudders faintly. “Not—well not on _that_ kind of scale, my life was not that crazy. I maybe should not have kissed either Jenny. There was this whole Jenny drama.”

“Sisters…?”

“No, jeez, no, if they were sisters it would’ve gone pretty differently. They just had the same name, it’s a pretty common name. Okay, like, short version, I’m too tired to get into the long version, one of them let me take her on a date and we made out some and then she ghosted me for like a month and I figured it wasn’t going to be a thing, and then the other Jenny let me take her on a date and we also made out some, and then the first Jenny started telling everyone I’d cheated on her even though she’d ghosted me. And that was before the prom, the prom was a disaster.”

“Oh _dear_. That sounds dreadful. But—unless I’m missing some human social context, you weren’t particularly at fault?”

“Not…really, I guess? They had this kind of rivalry going and I didn’t think about that part. I certainly didn’t know what would happen. But if I hadn’t kissed both of them, the whole mess wouldn’t have happened.”

“Mm. Did it ever leave you feeling…disgusted with yourself?”

“Not…really. Mostly confused and angry. Maybe if it happened now…I don’t know.” He’s quiet for a moment, then offers, gently, “Allura, you didn’t know. And the moment you did…”

“Everything changed. But still…I feel like a traitor. For even feeling…”

Feeling—the first self-conscious stirring of love since the death of her planet. That’s still there, she realizes. For a phantom, a mirage. The Lotor she’d thought he was. Not even a real loss to mourn. It would be easier if it was. She’s certainly had plenty of practice with that.

She can’t talk about that with Lance. That would just be…cruel.

“Maybe,” Lance says slowly, “if it is not the most intimidating idea on the face of the universe, which I admit it sounds like to me, talk about it with Shiro?”

Allura goes very still, and takes a careful breath. “You’re…probably right,” she admits, voice a little small. “On both points. That does sound intimidating.”

“Even…to you? You two have always been pretty close. Well, except for the whole acting weird when he was a clone thing.”

“We work closely together, and on an even footing. But we don’t…talk about personal issues much.” With each other or at all. “That was a lot of why I suggested treating the bond like that…” She picks at a seam on her thigh.

“It’s okay, Allura. Really. I’m just glad we’re all talking more now.” He squeezes her shoulder, just a little. “Go talk to him. Well, assuming he isn’t busy.”

Allura feels a quirk of a smile. “Even though he should be?”

“Well, he _has_ got a whole mullet all to himself now. Keith’s so demanding.” Lance unfolds just a little, takes a slightly more spirited bite of his dinner. As if just this contact, even when she’s being a selfish mess, perked him up.

Allura studies him for a moment. “Lance…are you lonely?”

Lance’s eyes widen and he makes a little hiccup noise around his mouthful.

“All day alone in the Red Lion, I mean?”

He gulps it down. “I’m not alone, I have Kaltenecker.”

“Lance…”

He deflates slightly, looking away. “It…is how it is. Besides, I…”

His face twists. He falls silent long enough to eat a few more bites of dinner.

“I don’t want to be around people sometimes these days but I don’t want to be alone either, I guess. Wow, that sounds dumb.”

“Why don’t you want to be around people?” she asks, puzzled. No, concerned. He’s pretty much the most outgoing person here.

“Because I feel like I’m not good company right now?”

“You’re lovely company,” Allura says, gentle and firm. “And would no doubt become more so if your own needs for companionship were met.”

Lance looks a little taken aback. “I…guess.” There’s some unease still stirring in him, deep and quiet, but he just brings up a smile. “If you wanna talk with Shiro tonight…”

“I…yes. Perhaps I should.”

Before she loses her nerve, really.

She takes her leave with grace—leaving Lance a little less slumped and actually eating his dinner—and goes to find Shiro. Fortunately he’s out, milling, talking logistics with Krolia and Matt. Allura slides in, listens, contributes. And catches Shiro as things break up. “Shiro, would you have some time to speak?”

“Of course.”

He leads her into the Black Lion, into the cockpit that’s empty because Keith is out running laps with his wolf to shake off the long hours of piloting. And takes one of the passenger chairs, not the pilot’s seat.

Allura’s heart twangs, just a little, and she takes the other.

“Allura,” he starts, cautious, just as she says, “Shiro.”

They look at each other, awkward, and he holds out his one hand as if to say _you first._

“All right.” She folds her hands tight in her lap, anxious. “I…do not know if an apology is required, but I wish to offer one.”

Shiro blinks. “I thought that would be my line. For what?”

“I was…perhaps too forward last night. And at an extremely delicate time.”

He blinks again, like he’s confused about what she’s referring to, and then shakes his head. “No. It’s okay.”

She nods, and tells herself very sternly that she needs to accept that and trust his word and let it go. “Why would you need to apologize?”

His jaw clenches. “For—dumping all that on you. You know I try not to listen to the link. But it’s been hard not to notice that you’ve been…deeply upset.”

“Oh,” Allura says, and drops his gaze. “I suppose I must be leaking quite a bit. I’m sorry about that. But please don’t apologize. I’m glad you were able to find solace.”

His face softens a little, and he bows his head with a small smile. “Thank you for listening.” He pauses. “Allura…is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’d wanted to ask, actually.” She gathers herself. “For a favor of sorts. It’s a selfish thing, perhaps, and an emotional imposition…”

“Only fair, I’d say. I asked the same of you last night.”

“It was no imposition,” she says, earnest.

“Then neither is this.”

“Oh,” Allura breathes. “Well played.”

Shiro inclines his head.

Of course now she has to actually find the words for this. She looks down at her hands for a moment as she rummages. “In some small way, I think I understand your fear. Of being seen…differently. As a sham, or a traitor.” Shiro stirs, just slightly, and she can see him refocusing, a serious weight in his gaze, though he doesn’t speak. “My relationship with Lotor…”

Shiro lets out a breath, slow and contained, and nods. “I can see why you would be afraid.” He tilts his head a little. “What favor are you asking, exactly?”

“Your…honest truth, I suppose.” She mulls, taken aback by how hard it is to answer. “I’m not seeking…cheap forgiveness. To hold a mirror up to myself, I suppose, and the ways I feel…” A series of words die in her throat, until she finally manages, “Complicit.”

Shiro nods again. He’s oddly calm, and seems neither angry nor put off. “Last night, at the end…you didn’t deny my feelings, or try to convince me that I was wrong about them. And that meant a lot to me. To be heard like that. So did everything you said.” He’s quiet for a long moment. “I think that means I’m going to give you two answers which maybe contradict a little.”

“Well,” says Allura, a little weakly, “these things are complicated.” It’s the understatement of the goddamn millennium, really. Standing here asking for some sort of redemption from the man her once-beloved raped.

“Here’s my honest truth. I don’t see you as a sham or a traitor at all. Or complicit. I see you as somebody he used and betrayed, quite horribly. Arguably in a far crueler way than he did me, though there’s no point in trying to compare that sort of thing, that just makes everybody feel worse.”

Allura opens her mouth to protest, and Shiro just nods, looking terribly calm and sad.

“But you also made your choices. I can’t deny you that agency, no more than you did mine. Given the circumstances of those choices and the lies you were told, I don’t hold them against you. As for the mirror…Allura, the mirror is everything you said to me last night.”

Allura blinks, suddenly set reeling.

“I’m starting to think,” Shiro goes on, “that we’re both very generous in forgiving others and very bad at forgiving ourselves.”

“Oh,” she says, in a voice that’s very small. “Oh, I…”

She must be freezing up so badly that Shiro’s worried, because he opens his single arm, offers an embrace, and she presses herself against him, and he’s very broad and solid and warm. She buries his face in the thin fabric of his shirt and shakes, subliminal little trembles, because some final piece of ground has cracked under her and she’s falling. She’s not even quite sure from where. But it feels…

She’s just like the others.

She’s just like the others, fallible and without excuses and capable of change, and it’s such a blessed relief she could cry.

Gods, had she really thought she was so far above them? Above reproach? Even after seeing the ugliness in her suspicion of Keith, the horror of that other reality? And yet—and yet it was so easy to buy into the fiction of her own power and leadership, to pretend her instincts, her training, her _father’s_ training, made her…

What a weakness that complacency had been. A nice little carrying handle for Lotor to slip his claws into. Along with her carefully cultivated trust. And her yearning for her people. She could not afford to lose the second, not after what she’d learned from Keith. It wouldn’t be possible to lose the third, no more than it would be possible to cut out her beating heart. But the complacency, the comfort in her Altean superiority…

Probably _somebody_ from the old court would laugh that she’s found her equal comrades in a group of monkeys about the age of pre-schoolers. Yet they—yet she—

“Allura,” Shiro says quietly.

Oh. She _is_ crying. Right in his shirt. His hand’s spanning her shoulderblades. “I’m all right,” she sniffs, and oh, it must sound silly, but really, she is. It’s liberating. The freedom shakes her to her bones.

Somehow Shiro believes her and just keeps holding her close. Hunched protectively over her, even, chin on her shoulder like he can make up for his missing arm. She feels small against him, and cries a little while, and remembers how to breathe. She can hear his heartbeat like this, smell his skin.

“I never thought you were complicit,” he says quietly, and his voice is a little rough. “Not—not either of me. He—my clone—was worried about you. What Lotor might do. But I’d driven such a wedge between us, and I couldn’t so much as…as cast suspicion on him without…”

He trails off briefly.

Allura hasn’t quite hugged him—she’s pressed against his chest, curled up, and now she unfolds an arm, slides it carefully around his solid middle. He squeezes her back, not particularly lightly, but she’s at no risk of being crushed by him; it’s quite nice, really.

“Oh, he was a perfect gentleman,” she says softly. It’s bitter as gall. “How better to lull me into idiocy. No, I kissed him, that was all on my head.”

“Personally,” Shiro says, voice small and frank, “I’d prefer that to the alternative.”

“Fair,” Allura croaks. “Oh gods, Shiro. How do I wipe away this stain?”

“Oh, I’ve no idea,” Shiro breathes. “We might not be able to. Just…grow past it, maybe.”

 

* * *

 

In the deep night, Lance dreams of Shiro’s chest, Shiro’s hand spanning his shoulderblades. Shiro’s heartbeat under his hands. They’re in a wide-open field, sky as far as the eye can see, alone with the world. They might be flying. Grass brushing his bare feet, hair floating off his shoulders…

Hair floating?

Lance sits bolt upright in his narrow red bunk.

“Oh my god,” he blurts to the soft humming darkness, fervent. “Allura’s totally into Shiro.”

He stays there stock still for a moment, mouth still hanging open, bracing himself for the hot rush of jealousy. Envy. Fear. Whatever.

There’s nothing but a faint, lukewarm gnawing, fading quickly.

“Okay, first,” Lance says experimentally, “duh, who wouldn’t be.” His nose wrinkles as he ponders that—now that’s a hot rush of guilt and disgust, and he explodes the rest of the way out of bed so he can pace off to his usual confidante. “Do-over. Only decent people are allowed to be into Shiro. No gross assholes ever ever again. Obviously does not apply in current circumstances, it’s _Allura._ ”

Kaltenecker’s quite fast asleep, but that doesn’t stop Lance from flopping against her side and letting her deep slow breaths rock him just a touch.

“Is he even…wait, yeah, he said in that interview once that he’s bi, I think. Also, yes, of _course_ Keith. I made enough of a stink about it, I’m not about to back down on that. Even if I knew whether he was into her, it’s moot.”

He sighs and relaxes a little further against Kaltenecker, legs sticking out, and wiggles his toes in the gloom.

“Man. Yeah, I really can’t fault her taste this time. Even if it’s…oh, hell. She deserves something that actually goes somewhere too. Well, maybe she’s still rebounding from the eggplant. But…when she’s ready…”

He’s quiet for a long time. He’s aching now. Not jealousy. Just…resignation. And also aching on her behalf.

“Not gonna be Shiro, I guess. Even if it would be cute and classy as all heck. Maybe in another reality.” He leans his head back. “She and Hunk would be super cute, though I don’t think that’s a thing for either them, and I can’t tell whether Hunk and Shay have an actual long-distance thing or are still just really gooshy for each other. And Hunk and Romelle have really hit it off. And Hunk and Pidge are like nerd married. Man, Hunk’s pimping. Hypothetically.”

He stretches. Kaltenecker’s tail flicks.

“Is Allura into girls? Is Pidge into anybody who isn’t a nerd? Aw hell. Though if Allura is into girls, Romelle…she could be with another Altean who isn’t psycho, that could be really great for her…”

And a distracting mental image. Very distracting.

“Okay, but if Allura winds up with Matt I’m going to stop taking it like a man. Because _why_. If she wanted a corny scrawny human guy who embarrasses her a lot, I’m right here and I’m not as pasty, c’mon.” His mouth twists. “I guess if she wants somebody smart. Shit, she might want somebody smart, the eggplant was super-nerdy. Still, there’s better options for that, Matt’s hair is horrible…”

He yawns hugely.

“She just…shouldn’t have to be alone…if she doesn’t want to. When she’s ready.” Yawn again. “Whoever…whoever she wants…I will put up with Matt Holt if it means she’s not alonezzzz…”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably going to keep coming slower from here, but I'm gonna wrap up this freaking thing. I'm getting there!

Lance, even as he stretches out yawning in his pilot’s chair as they get under way the next morning, still isn’t quite sure whether Allura wound up talking with Shiro, or what they said. But at least Allura feels better. Much better. Lighter, somehow.

He also isn’t sure how or why she talked Coran and Romelle into riding with him instead of her for the day. Or, no, he’s more surprised that she _did_. It was…nice, after fussing about him being lonely the night before. And okay, the three hours of them playing weird holographic cards got a little old because he couldn’t even see what was going on, but then Romelle rambled about the colony and he rambled about Cuba and he learned a bunch of neat Altean things from both of them and they taught each other songs.

By dinner, he’s feeling…also better. Lighter, somehow. And he’s pretty sure he needs to take his own advice. So he takes a deep breath, squares his jaw, and knocks on the paw of the loafing Black Lion.

After a moment, without even commentary over the speakers, the jaws open. So he _guesses_ he hasn’t interrupted the universe’s most important hot makeouts? Which would’ve been tragic. But somehow he can’t imagine Keith bothering to answer the phone—lion-knock, whatever—during hot makeouts.

And in fact, Shiro and Keith are both in the lion’s cargo bay as he comes in, leaning against the wall and sucking down water pouches and generally looking athletically mussed. Which is probably foreplay for them. Or maybe that’s just Lance’s dirty mind. Shiro is wearing a tank top, which is more skin than he’s ever seen on him, and it takes every ounce of willpower Lance has to not stare at the stump of his mechanical arm, the corded muscles of his flesh one, the puncture scars dotting his shoulder. The tank top’s white, a lethally stunning combination with his newly white hair. Aii.

“Do you need something?” Keith asks. He doesn’t _sound_ particularly hostile, but it’s hard to tell.

“Wow, I’ve never been down here, this place is like twice the size of Red’s cargo bay. Which is. Totally not surprising. Uh.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and tries desperately to stop babbling. Damn it, Keith’s gotten even more ripped. _Why_ did he have to go and turn out to be bisexual anyway? His life would be so much easier if he was just into girls. “I just. Wanted to make sure we were okay.” He makes vague head motions to encompass them both.

Keith looks a little puzzled, and Shiro looks at Keith, and then smiles at Lance, small and guarded. “Of course we are,” Shiro says.

“…okay.” Lance isn’t sure he can keep the doubt from his voice. Lance isn’t sure he _wants_ to keep the doubt from his voice.

“About what?” Keith asks.

Lance takes a moment to regret his choice of arena—maybe if he asked Red very nicely, the floor could _actually_ swallow him in there. No, he’s gotta eat his dirt and see this through. “Uh. My little stint as Universe’s Most Asshole Yenta? Or—whatever else?” It’s a vague category. Jeez, he’s not going to straight up _ask_ them if they’re weirded out by his stupid crushes, you can’t just do that.

Keith and Shiro trade another one of those brief, communicative glances, and then Shiro lets out a slow breath and jerks his head at the crates in the corner.

They all sit. At least there’s not a carpet to call him onto.

“There was a point,” Shiro says, sounding quite gentle, “when I was very angry at you about that. Not for long. And not anymore.”

“I mean…fair. I was a dick.”

“I’d been…struggling with whether to admit it.” His hand drifts to Keith’s. They’ve graduated to hand-holding, apparently. Well, hand-holding around a water pouch.

“Me too,” Keith puts in. “Well, more or less. Actually bring it up for real and get the rejection over with, from my point of view.”

Lance winces, because that’s very painfully identifiable, really.

“I think,” Shiro says, “that I was angry at you for taking that choice away, when you get down to it.”

Lance winces harder and bows his head. “I’m sorry. I…wasn’t thinking straight.” He kicks himself internally for that slip of the tongue—yeah, no shit. “I realized later that…that you’ve had enough choices taken away from you.”

“Why’d you do it?” Keith asks.

“Because I felt like I was gonna explode and I didn’t know what else to do,” Lance mutters, utterly frank. “Because of what I said, about thinking you two are good for each other and all, and.” His throat tightens. “And because I was tired of feeling your pain, and wanted you to find some happiness, for both our sakes. A-and I’m sorry, that’s a dick thing to say—”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Shiro says, and there’s an ache in his voice that makes Lance pick his head up. “Not for that. God, Lance. _I’m_ tired of you feeling my pain. That’s exactly what scared me so badly that I tried to run off with the rebels. You should _never_ have to feel that.”

Shiro takes a breath, and looks a little to one side, down, makes eye contact again, and somehow right then, in that random little moment, Lance feels like he sees—him. The man under all the grand achievements, under all the suffering, with deep gray eyes and a universe-encompassing heart and no anger in him at all right now. _Oh, crap_ , he thinks, because yeah, he’s doomed.

“And when I realized,” Shiro starts again, and it takes a moment for Lance to even realize he’s talking. “That I was angry at you because you lashed out under the pressure of what I’d put on you, even unwittingly—when I realized that, I stopped being angry. Because that’s a dick move. To hurt somebody, regardless of intent, and then resent their pain? I’m not that kind of man. I refuse to be.”

Lance realizes he’s wrapped his arms around himself, just lightly, and mostly he’s stunned into silence by—by Shiro, by everything about Shiro.

“And then,” Shiro admits, with a sheepish little smile that Lance wishes he could look at forever, “you kind of went and distracted me.”

Lance laughs, equally sheepish, and feels his face warm. “Well, guess I did a good job of hiding that stupid crush if it caught you that off balance?”

“I’ve been told I’m oblivious at times,” Shiro says, smile going a little wry, and okay, Lance is still reeling a little from getting to see him like this, frank and calm and open. It fades fast, though, a serious edge settling as he starts, “Lance, about that, I…”

Lance flaps his hand. “Dude. You’re with Keith. Don’t worry about it.”

It comes out surprisingly easily, even with the cold ache trickling down his throat. Shiro studies him with great care, and Lance squirms under his dissection, but some obscure instinct makes him keep his head up, hold his gaze.

“I won’t,” he says, then restarts. “I will do my level best to not get weird about it ever again? I think that’s probably all I can promise because I’m an idiot.” The chill is spreading weirdly through his arms now. His fingers feel crimped. “But getting weird is one of the last things I want, so…”

Shiro nods, and the pressure eases, and some haunted look passes across his face that Lance can’t read at all. “All right.”

“So…we’re cool?” Lance asks, unsure.

Shiro nods. “You’ve realized what line you crossed, you won’t do it again. We can’t keep score against each other. Not as friends, not as teammates, not as…whatever the hell this bond is.” He cracks a bit of a smile, lopsided. “And, well, I can hardly complain about the results.”

Lance quavers with gratitude at that, but doesn’t quite settle. “Yeah, but…there’s not keeping score, and there’s saying you’re not keeping score but kinda doing it without meaning to.”

“You mean like what you do with yourself?” Shiro says mildly.

Lance winces.

“Shiro doesn’t keep score,” Keith says, a touch of fervent defensiveness in his voice. “He didn’t keep score against me when I was the world’s worst teenager, he’s certainly not going to against—” He stops himself kind of abruptly. His voice is coming from somewhere across the room, Lance realizes.

“You were _far_ from the world’s worst teenager,” Shiro says patiently.

“Against what?” Lance asks, blinking.

“Never mind,” Keith says. He’s pacing slowly along the far wall, not looking straight at them, silent as a cat. There’s a jittery hunch to his shoulders.

“Oh, man,” Lance breathes, and jangles to his feet. “Keith…”

“I’m fine,” Keith says flatly. “Sit down.”

Shiro studies him carefully. Lance wobbles, unsure, sits mostly because he feels dumb.

“Well,” Shiro says, a little brightly, like he’s saving fussing over Keith until they’re in private. “I guess that makes you the second person to somewhat unnecessarily apologize to me in two days. I feel like that should be my job.”

Lance feels a strange, fluttery relief. Good. No wonder she’s felt better. “So Allura…?”

Shiro blinks. “You—knew?”

“She already felt horrible because of the whole eggplant thing, and also…yeah, we talked before she talked to you. She apologized to me too. Uh, for other stuff obviously.” Lance pauses, mouth twisting. “Anyway, why is that your job?”

“For dumping all of that on you.”

“Nope,” Lance says, as firmly as he can manage in the face of Shiro’s Shiro-ness. “Apology denied. Look, me and Kaltenecker were on Team It Helps To Talk About Your Problems from day one and that means I’m not gonna think it’s a bad thing when you talk about your problems. I’m glad you did. For real, glad.”

There’s another one of those dizzying little moments where he’s not seeing Shiro’s facade at all, just genuine tenderness, and then Shiro ducks his head with a faint smile. “All right. Thanks.”

Lance smiles back, feeling just a little bit lighter himself. Then chances a look at Keith.

Keith looks away the moment he sees him, simmering in profile, dark curls against his cheeks. Goddamnit. No. Nope. Lance is not going to pine about the fucking mullet. Shiro has embarrassed the world enough on the subject of mullets. Shiro and Keith are together just like they belong, everything’s straightened out, Shiro doesn’t secretly hate him, there’s nothing more Lance could ask for. Well, Keith not resenting him, but it looks like that ship has sailed.

“All right,” Lance echoes, late. “Well, I should let you two get back to being very manly. If the air is cleared. I just wanted to clear the air.”

Keith doesn’t say anything. The air doesn’t _feel_ clear, not between them, but he’s not saying anything, and Shiro is letting him putter off.

Then Keith follows him. After another of those Looks between him and Shiro.

“Lance,” Keith says, as they leave the cargo bay behind them. “I…”

“Mm?”

Keith stalls for a moment, then blows out air between his teeth. “Never mind.”

“Oh, come on. You do not get to Lance-I-never-mind right now. If you’re angry, just spit it out, I’m a big boy, I can take it.”

“Why does everyone always assume I’m angry,” Keith mutters.

“‘Cause a lot of the time you are and also you have resting bitch face?” He pauses, considering. “Okay maybe less the first thing these days. Definitely still the second. And anyway, you sound kinda angry right now.”

Keith’s resting bitch face readjusts in the slightly more petulant direction. “I wanted to ask something but I wasn’t even sure how to ask it so I didn’t. That’s all.”

Lance chews on his lip. “Well, I’m just gonna fire blind, then? Uh, let’s see…I can deal with it if you’re pissed at me because I crossed a line? I have absolutely zero designs on Shiro and you don’t need to get all territorial? I also promise to do my best not to get weird at you? What else…”

“I’m not territorial,” Keith says quietly.

“…no offense, dude, but you looked pretty upset.”

There are gears turning behind Keith’s eyes, and Lance has no idea what they are, and what finally comes out is, “Not at you. Not at anybody.” Lance must look like he doesn’t believe him, because then he says, slightly annoyed, “If I look upset, it’s because of things inside me that are mine to deal with. That don’t have anything to do with things other people did.”

“Okay…” Lance scratches the back of his head. “Then what were you trying to ask me?”

“I don’t know if there’s an answer. Or if it’s even a good thing to ask.”

“Team It Helps To Talk About Your Problems, remember?”

“How is your cow on that team with you. She’s a cow, she can’t talk.”

“She’s a very good listener,” Lance says proudly.

“Hrn,” says Keith. Then, eventually, “Look, I…I always figured you just hated me and then got better at dealing with it so we could work together. So the stuff you said—I guess I’m still trying to figure out what it all means.”

Lance tries not to wince visibly, and swallows that gutpunch with a lopsided smile. “What, you’ve never had an angry crush?”

Keith’s brow furrows. “No?” Then it furrows further. “I guess there was that one football player in that horrible school in Tempe, when I was just starting to realize I was into guys. But he was a jerk. I don’t think I ever even _spoke_ with him. We’re like…actual friends?” The question is vague, tentative.

“Well, to be fair, we didn’t exactly speak at the Garrison either,” Lance points out. Keith winces slightly. “But yeah, angry crush and actual friendship and hardcore respect is a…it’s a weird mix, I gotta admit. I keep thinking it’s gonna make the angry part of the angry crush go away, but then you keep pulling crazy stunts like…okay, like basically everything you’ve done since coming back from the colony.” He feels his mouth twist. “No wonder I sound like I’m jerking you around sometimes.”

Keith digests that. “Why does that stuff make you angry? Are you…jealous?” He sounds legitimately and completely bewildered that anybody might be jealous of him.

Lance snorts. “Of your perfect cheekbones and sculpted muscles and freakishly good piloting and strength and speed and resourcefulness and absolute badassery and ninja skills and teleporting space wolf and saving us all about three times over in twenty minutes and rediscovering lost Altea and being incredibly cool at nearly all times and growing into a really amazing thoughtful leader from being an emo jerk and also growing an extra inch you fucker and getting to make out with Shiro even though that’s my fault? Jeez, why would anyone be envious of you, I can’t imagine, _god, Keith, you’re dense._ ”

Keith blinks at him, and he might actually, just a little bit, be blushing. Which is a goddamn triumph.

“You know,” Lance goes on without mercy, “false humility can be fucking infuriating, but I don’t think that’s actually what this is, you really are that oblivious. Also, for the record, envious, not jealous, at least these days.”

Keith’s mouth works for a moment. “What’s the difference?”

“Jealous is when you want the other guy to _not_ have the thing so you can have it, envious is when you want it _too_. First one’s asshole, second one’s just pathetic.” It’s out of his mouth before he can stop it, flippant and far too honest.

Keith closes his eyes for a moment, bites his lip, and finally says, slow and deliberate, “Lance, you realize I’m envious of you too. Even before I started liking you at all.”

“What,” Lance sputters, suddenly lost and in freefall. “You’re…you can’t be… _why?_ ”

“At first…because you had friends. _Family_. You weren’t alone. People liked you. You could laugh and be happy and have a future, you were…normal. Even if you were a dick. Somebody would care if you died in a ditch. I’d never had that. Not for years. And then—when I started getting to know you as my teammate, as my Red—I realized that it wasn’t just that you were normal. You really care about people. You’re _good_ with people when you’re not being a jerk for no reason. You’re understanding and kind and always want to help. And you can laugh and be happy and have fun with people and make friends.”

“That’s just…but that’s nothing,” Lance blurts, floundering.

“It’s not nothing when you don’t have it,” Keith says, almost vicious. “You can’t learn that stuff. And without it—” He makes a frustrated noise, like he’s searching for words. “Without it, life doesn’t matter.”

Lance freezes, a dull ache spreading in his chest.

“All I’m good at is war,” Keith finishes, voice a little strangled. “You’re good at living.”

Lance takes two steps forward and wraps him up gently.

Keith makes a tiny squeak in the back of his throat and stiffens.

He’s still shorter than him, just a little. Lance hunches over him, enveloping him as best as he can, face in his shoulder. “You’re better at that stuff than you think,” he says, putting every ounce of sincerity he has into it. “You can totally learn it. You _are_ learning it. And you’re never gonna be alone again.” He closes his eyes, feels Keith relax a tiny bit. “I care about your life. Like. A lot.” He squeezes him softly. “So do a lot of other people. And you have an _amazing_ future.”

Keith exhales slowly and hugs him back, relaxing another inch or two. “Thanks,” he says quietly. “I guess…that stuff’s still all sinking in.”

“The thing where you feel stuff and you’re like goddammit, I know better, but I’m still feeling this stuff and I don’t know how to make it go away?”

“The thing,” Keith acknowledges, a little wry. “I guess I…”

He takes a deep breath. Lance can feel it filling him. Then he lets it out, gut-deep, shedding another layer of tension.

“Dad died when I was five, you know,” he says quietly.

Lance—hadn’t known. He’d sort of gathered Keith’s dad was gone, but not…not that young. Shit. He gives him another little squeeze and lets him empty out, because okay, vomiting feelings is apparently contagious. Even Keith’s got it, it’s jumped past the weird psychic bond. Well, he’ll panic if Keith’s Badass Mom catches it.

“After that, I kept getting shuffled between foster homes. Wound up in this group home that was…awful. That was where I was when Shiro got me into the Garrison. It was always the same thing. Nobody wanted me because I couldn’t get along with other kids, because I was antisocial and had behavior problems. I felt…I knew I was…broken. Like there was something just _wrong_ with me. There was this thing that came naturally to everybody else, and that I could never do right, and not being able to do it was destroying my whole life. I guess I…I guess that’s still…in there somewhere.”

“That’s bullshit,” Lance murmurs, and squeezes him harder. “Not how you felt, I mean. But _doing_ that to a kid…ugh. Americans.”

“I don’t think you can squeeze it out of me, Lance,” Keith says, a little thinly.

“I can _try_ ,” Lance pouts, with a squish for emphasis. Something pops, and Keith groans and slumps against him. “Whoa, steady there. Man, you’re heavier than you look, must be all the muscle.”

“Muh,” says Keith, and puts his face in Lance’s shoulder, and Lance realizes abruptly that he’s never seen him this relaxed. Not around him. Around Shiro, maybe. He feels all the awe one feels when the skittish stray cat finally lets you pet it, which is to say he keeps squishing him. “I feel dumb that it’s still getting to me.”

“Hey. Realizing it’s getting to you is the first step to stopping it from getting to you.”

“I guess?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re still hugging,” Keith mumbles into Lance’s shoulder after a pause.

“Is that a problem, o esteemed leader?”

“Is it weird that it isn’t?”

“No.” Lance readjusts him a little so he can slump more comfortably. “Honestly I don’t think any of us are getting enough hugs. They’re very important to our well-being, you know. There are studies.”

“ _Studies._ ”

“Yeah. Super scientific. Or so I heard.”

Keith snorts at that, and then they hug a bit more in silence, and then Keith inhales, picking his head up, like he just realized something important. “Lance.”

“Mm?”

“I couldn’t be a good Black Paladin without a good second in command. And you’re not—it’s been a long time since you were nobody to me.”

“How long,” Lance breathes, and he didn’t quite mean it to sound like a challenge, but his heart’s kind of in his throat right now.

Keith blinks. “Since…oh, that was years ago.”

“Less for me.”

“Yeah. That’s still weird sometimes. Arus. When you were hurt.”

“Oh,” Lance says, and his heart stays in his throat. “That…yeah that was, like, forever ago.”

“I’d thought we’d had a bonding moment. You brushed me off. Said you didn’t remember.”

Lance’s heart sinks a little, chilled. “Crap. I…I was probably trying to play cooler-than-you or something. I dunno. I…I say a lot of dumb shit I don’t mean. Or that I want to think I mean but I don’t actually mean.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” Keith says, petulant.

“Can’t help you there, it doesn’t make sense to me either.”

Keith’s quiet for a moment. Then he finally pulls back. _Oh shit_ , Lance thinks, because his facade’s cracked too. There’s something _soft_ in his eyes that only ever comes out for Shiro, and Lance’s heart trips faster, and he bites the inside of his cheek and screams internally.

“You’re…not nobody,” he says again. Then, “I missed you. When I was away. I didn’t expect to, but I did.”

“Same. Okay, I kind of did expect to even if I didn’t always want to. But I—don’t hate you. Not for real.” Lance hesitates, then sticks out his hand. “Friends?”

Keith’s face melts a little more, and he answers with a warm, bonecrushing grip. “Friends.”

 

* * *

 

Shiro keeps telling himself he shouldn’t be listening. But it’s a small, echoey lion. More echoey today, maybe, like Black wants him to hear—he could swear sound doesn’t _usually_ travel this easily from the entrance corridor. And he’d been worried about Keith, given the shadows that had passed over his face earlier.

He hadn’t needed to be, apparently.

Shiro leans against a wall, and relaxes quietly, and is so proud of Keith it hurts. Both of them, really. They’re finally sorting it out.

Eventually the whir of Black’s jaws closes behind Lance, and Keith putters back into the heart of the beast, and pauses for a moment when he sees Shiro. “Were you…did you hear all that?”

“Ah…” Shiro freezes for a moment, caught out. “More or less. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Keith murmurs, and folds into himself a little. It’s almost painful. He’d relaxed on Lance’s shoulder. To a rare and precious extent. After an opaque silence, Keith says, “I guess he’s…pretty serious about being into you, huh.”

“I could say the same about you,” Shiro says, without even much thought, because deflecting is still a _lot_ easier than thinking about that.

Keith looks like he’d very much like to be able to deflect that right back. What _is_ eating at him…? “Well, he’s weird.”

Shiro takes a careful breath and hazards a guess. “I know your strengths, Keith. For one thing, he was right about you being better at those things than you think you are.”

Keith stiffens slightly, caught out in turn. Then forces his shoulders back down.

“And for another,” Shiro goes on, “you’re who I fell for. You, as you are. That is _not_ going to change.”

Keith’s wariness fades into a soft smile. “I…guess there’s some other stuff that’s still sinking in.” His voice is quite small. “Yeah.”

“You don’t have to be normal for me,” Shiro says quietly, opening his arm and letting Keith fold against his side. “Just…you. You’re incredible, you know.”

Keith’s quiet for a long moment, then says, very slowly, “There’s this…stray thought that keeps telling me that you deserve…normal. Not boring normal. But somebody who’s good at living, at being happy, all that stuff. I’m not somebody who can give you that. And sometimes I think…you’d be better with somebody who could.”

Shiro’s heart aches, and for a moment he can’t even begin to answer. “I love you,” he manages finally, and Keith makes a little noise and presses closer to him, because yeah, those words still hit him hard, every time. “That’s what brings happiness. You’re not seriously trying to tell me I’d be better off with Lance?”

“Or Hunk,” Keith mutters. “Or Allura…look it’s not _specific_ to Lance.”

“Allura’s not good at that,” Shiro says quietly, without much thought, and Keith goes quiet. “She just…fakes it a lot, I think.”

“I’m not—actually trying to tell you that,” Keith says, sounding a little desperate. “I…I could have lived my life without you returning my feelings. I don’t know if I could…n-no, never mind, I shouldn’t—” He makes a pained noise and restarts. “It’s one of those things I think sometimes that doesn’t line up with other things I think.”

“I get it,” Shiro says as gently as he can. “It’s okay. But no, Keith, you’re not going to lose me like that.” He turns his face into Keith’s hair to soothe his aching chest. And finally, in a weary mumble, lets slip, “I used to be good at those things. I don’t know…how I’ll ever be again.”

Keith makes another one of those small noises, this time sounding more like concern, and slides an arm around his ribs.

_Happiness_ , Shiro thinks. Maybe—maybe it’s time to take a leaf out of Lance’s book, as ridiculous as that would’ve sounded even a few weeks ago. _He_ doesn’t wait around for that stuff. Of course it’s easier for him—that’s a bitter, sharp-edged thought, and Shiro shoves it down. It’s not like Lance hasn’t felt the shadows that drag down Shiro’s mind. _Viscerally._ God help them both.

Keith doesn’t cling, but flows with him, pliant, as he turns just a little, moves them from side-to-side to face-to-face, and cups his cheek in his palm. Keith relaxes another few inches, leaning into his hand with a soft smile, and one of his hands runs through Shiro’s short hair in answer.

Shiro turns his face up to kiss him, slow and burning, and Keith twines around him with a shiver of raw need. God. How much must it have cost him to be so very calm and together and patient through all this bullshit? To admit that some part of him wants to step aside for some hallucinatory good-for-somebody-else? Not that Shiro needs to ask who he picked up that habit from—ouch.

Keith’s teeth graze him as he deepens the kiss, and at least then Shiro’s train of thought starts to derail. God, please, he thinks, despite becoming an atheist _long_ ago. Please let him just enjoy this, and love Keith, and live.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny background mention of weed in this chapter. Typing this makes me think of that Rocky callback about drug mentions and the R rating as Columbia slips her nip. Not that anybody's slipped a nip in this fic either. The angst to nip ratio is like way out of whack.

Shiro finally blocks out the time and the water supply to make full use of what Lance had given him. It feels ridiculous, shamefully self-indulgent, especially since he needs to ask Keith for a hand, but it would be sad to let them go unused. He follows the instructions to the letter. The full-body scrub—in part under Keith’s strong warm hands—leaves him strangely self-aware, tingling, soft. And cleaner than he’s felt in years. The scar goo goes on once he’s dried, sinking in for half an hour on the whole ragged array. There’s lotion for the rest of his skin, and by the time Keith’s done with that, Shiro’s almost shivering from how good it feels. He keeps rubbing his legs together without realizing it. Keith can’t quite keep his hands off him.

Then they wipe off all the goo and Shiro lies in Keith’s lap and lets him play with his hair and pet him all over, and for an hour, maybe even two, he doesn’t think of anything wretched. For an hour, maybe even two, he feels almost normal.

Later he dreams of the sea, blue and glittering in the sun, salt-wind and clean and bright. Foam over his bare feet. Then wading in, warm and ever-moving, and diving under the surface, and breathing easy as air. Swimming like a fish. Down past one wonder after another, faint voices, coiling lights. Towards a deep part of the sea where little creatures sparkle like stars in the depths.

The world ripples.

He _knows_ , in that gut dream-sense, that he’s hanging at crossroads. Where he came from: the sea. On the one side: open space, nebulae splashing off his skin, stars falling around him, icy comets and asteroids glinting like diamonds, and far in the distance a white star burning. On the other side: a cloudy purple universe, no star but a deep velvety black-silence, a hazy glint like the surface of a salt flat.

He hangs there, between, for a long while. But there’s no thread he can see. No chain binding them, no rivets to claw free. Just this place where the seas and stars of their minds blur together, and he can’t see a way to fix it even here.

He knows where he belongs.

He swims long into the purple-cloud universe, rippling just under—above?—the surface. He’s not sure which way is up. The great bowl of eternity arcs around him.

A faint figure flickers in the dark before him, limned in purple light. Black hair feathering the back of his skull. Arm ripped from him, machinery sparking at his shoulder. Transparent. Ghostly.

“You,” Shiro calls, and reaches, and his voice feels sticky in his throat, and they’re on the same side of the mirror. He turns. They’re standing, face to face. They never have before. One arm apiece, almost hesitantly, they touch fingertips.

The other is smiling, faint and sad. Closer, here on his side of the mirror, his eyes are brown-black smudges, dripping down his cheeks, gouged out because they were never his to begin with. _Keith?_ he asks, and he doesn’t quite have a voice. Just a hum of thought, intention, yearning.

“Yeah,” Shiro says, mouth dry. “We’re…I’ll take care of him for you. For both of us. I promise.”

_Allura? And Lance?_

“We’re…working it out. And we’re closer than we’ve ever been. I just…hope they can both forgive themselves one day.”

The other’s mouth twists, wry, and he moves his hand, taps Shiro’s chest. _You too, nimrod._

“Well, that’s a little hypocritical of you, isn’t it.”

The smile becomes even more wry. _I don’t have to live with it. You do._

Shiro winces slightly. “Our sense of humor is terrible.”

_You just noticed._

Shiro’s silent for a moment, throat burning, because he _should_ say what he so desperately wants to say, and he’s terrified to, and it feels so rankly unfair. He doesn’t know how many innocent lives he’s destroyed to get this far, and here, blood dripping, is another. And he doesn’t want to apologize for being alive, but, but…

“I’m sorry,” he blurts finally. “About your body. About—I didn’t want to kill you.”

_Takashi, you big idiot._ He sounds tired.

Shiro has to fight to breathe for a moment, because he hadn’t heard his given name since—hell, since Adam left. Broken years. It runs right through to his heart to hear it now.

_You had nothing to do with it. Haggar killed me._ His hand drops to his broken shoulder, picking at spare wires. _Keith helped, but that was self-defense. Allura helped more. Finished me off for your sake, and I don’t think she’s realized that yet, and she’ll probably have a breakdown when she does._

“Oh.” The burning spreads down his throat. His chest. His heart’s aching. “Damn it. _Damn_ it. You…”

_I’d rather you have me than her._

“ _Damn_ it…”

_I’d rather be you than…well, myself I guess. Whoever that asshole was. Fake you._

“Fuck…” There’s something wet and hot in Shiro’s eyes, and the other’s face goes still under the haze dripping from his eyes.

_Oh_. He pries his hand off his shoulder. Reaches out to touch Shiro’s face, and he’s insubstantial, a tickle, a feather, an unpleasant memory. _Huh. I didn’t think anyone would cry for me._

 

* * *

 

Lance wakes up crying.

Again.

He holds up his shaking hands because he can still feel the red stuff sliding over them, thick and hot, clotted, flesh and lifeblood and cloning fluid and the sticky dark residue of magic. His heart’s hammering and he feels sick and the last few moments of the nightmare are still pounding through his mind’s eye. The fear in Shiro-who-wasn’t’s face, lying there paralyzed and very much alive, as he’d shoved his hands into his ribcage and ripped out his beating heart. To sew in the crystal that’s Shiro.

His slim, strong dark hands. His hands seeping blue-white light.

Maybe some other night he’d feel ridiculous to be hyperventilating in the dark like this. How embarrassing, crying again, shouldn’t this part be over by now. But he just buries his face in his hands and scream-sobs into them.

He doesn’t know how long it is until he manages to peel himself out of bed, suck down a water pouch, and go put his face in his cow. Longer still until he tries to make sense of it, any sense at all. Because god, he doesn’t want to.

It’s the middle of the night, and he desperately wants to call Shiro, but he shouldn’t. He shouldn’t wake him up. Even if Shiro’s up because he doesn’t sleep much, he doesn’t dare wake _Keith_ up. Besides, what would he even ask him? Hey Shiro, does it count as murder if you remember him and have his body and all his memories? And are we all going to chicken out of even thinking about this for Allura’s sake?

Team It Helps To Talk About Your Problems sounds like a team for a much nicer day right now.

He curls up very small against Kaltenecker’s side. After a while, she cranes her neck over to lip at his hair, warm and slimy, and he can’t even bring himself to shove her off.

If he had this dream, Allura hadn’t. Just like the last, oh-so-different dream about Shiro. How much…how much does she think about that stuff when she’s awake? Is it just here with Lance in the dark, instead if in her own mind?

No, Lance thinks, grinding his forehead in warm scratchy cow. That’s just something he’s thinking so that he doesn’t think about the part where the guy he played Monsters & Mana with and who he sat with in the asphyxiating dark and who smiled at him on Olkarion is _dead._ Dead and also kinda turned back into the guy he was cloned from who is also amazing and awesome. He wants to scream with sheer, ridiculous frustration. What does that even _mean_? Do you light a candle or something for him or not?

He’s leaking again, so maybe that’s a yes.

Not that he has a candle. Or…anything, really.

He settles for a scattering of dried flowers picked out of the bales of cheap hay they got for Kaltenecker’s feed and a mumbled not-particularly-to-anything prayer. It feels pathetic even as he does it. It’s the only thing he can do.

 

* * *

 

Allura wakes an hour before usual, well-rested, wide awake, calm.

She gathers her robe around her, soothes the mice with her fingertips as they wiggle hopefully. Slips past the snoring bundle on Coran’s bunk, the—well, the sprawl on the floor next to Romelle’s. How she manages to sleep so blissfully after having slid entirely out of bed, Allura will never know.

She settles in the cockpit in the cold dusty-gray light of dawn on this ball of ice and rock. She doesn’t wake Blue, of course. But she feels at home here. Well. At least as much as she can anywhere, with the Castle’s bridge, her old quarters, everything else gone.

Coils of mist rise off the dusty gray plain before her, drift by ever-so-slowly in the planet’s feeble atmosphere like a slow procession.

She takes a deep, slow breath. Two. Six. Ten.

Gods, she’s been wretched. So caught up in her guilt about Lotor that she’s lost focus. The bond. She needs to get to the root of this bond so she can free Shiro from it as he so desperately desires.

She has no recourse but her instincts. To turn her focus within and hope something comes to her. But it’s better than doing nothing. And she’d promised.

She keeps breathing. Closes her eyes. Tries to see within herself, around herself. The patterns of quintessence.

The thin thread spiraling to Lance, keeping his heart beating and his lungs drawing breath. That’s easy enough to sense, now that she knows it’s there. There’s the texture of it, the grabbiness, the sinking suspicion that she could snare his will with it.

He’s not asleep, she realizes without much thinking on it, and emotions thick and raw and sad drip back along the thread like dewdrops on a spiderweb, and her heart aches for him, and she tries to look away without peeping.

But where is the second thread?

She’s searched and searched before. Again she searches, here in the dim blur of her inner eye. It’s not a sense she’s much practiced. But she’d found that first thread easily enough. And at first she’d thought it was because she’s not giving life essence to Shiro. But the distance nearly killed him…

No, she realizes. The distance _destabilized_ him. That still doesn’t mean there’s a direct thread of quintessence like there is with Lance. _Think it through, Allura_ , says the deep warm voice in the depths of her memory. _If there isn’t an obvious solution, start again from what you know for sure._

“Oh, Father,” she breathes. “How I still miss you…”

She’d been thinking in terms of binding. But that was just—an assumption. What does she _know?_

She’d contained the true Shiro’s soul. The resonance had started after that. _Resonance_. That’s the key. She needn’t look for a bond at all. Her presence—their presence—is helping Shiro’s soul take root.

Yet there she hits a wall. She turns over one metaphor after another, hunts about herself. Watering, a soft stream of something far less distinct than the life energy she’s feeding Lance—there’s nothing like that. Resonance in the sense of intersecting wavelengths, strengthening his—nothing like that either. Glue—

“And here’s a lovely morning, Princess!”

Coran bursts into the cockpit with all his usual energy, Romelle in his wake.

Allura jolts out of her trance with only a _little_ squeak.

“A-and good morning to you too,” she says faintly.

It dogs her all through the day’s flying, yet she doesn’t dare go searching again, not at the helm. Gods, it would be convenient to be able to hand off the controls, even for a few hours. For _all_ of them. Their progress constantly slowed by the need for sleep, meals, stretching their legs.

This time they nest for the night high on a rocky mountain, keeping well away from the pre-spaceflight natives that clustered in the muggy river valleys of this distant plant. The views are staggering, and more than a few cameras come out, and Hunk declares that the place is awesome enough to justify brownies after dinner, which gets all the humans very excited. Even Keith looks interested. Shiro and Lance have both been withdrawn, thoughtful, but Lance practically velcros himself to Hunk’s side as the sweet-smelling things cook in the camping oven, and Pidge and Matt are chattering about some old acquaintance of theirs who also made the things, only these ones are described as _edible_ brownies, which is a distinction that makes Allura a little concerned.

“So the batches got swapped,” Pidge says, grinning hugely.

“And then I was having a good morning,” Matt says, expansive.

“Nooooo,” says Hunk. Lance is snorting into his hand with obvious glee.

“Especially when the mail robot came,” Pidge prompts.

“I was convinced it was an alien ambassador,” Matt says earnestly. “I tried! Oh, I tried six different forms of communication! At least one of them was semaphore with my shoes. But nothing worked. He returned to his home world after I failed to established diplomatic ties.” He scratches his chin. “I did tie a picture of a bird to him.”

Lance bursts out laughing. It goes and it goes, wheezing and gigglesnorting every time he nearly recovers, until he’s slumped against Hunk’s arm and Hunk is giving him a _there there_ kind of shoulderpat.

“Jeez,” says Pidge, “it is actually _that_ funny?”

“Nah nope no hey it totally was.” Lance offers her a gooby grin, then cracks up snorting again. “Also I needed a good laugh, but it totally was.”

The late-setting second sun is painting his skin gold and every eyelash is picked out in the brilliant light, even the ones that shine and clump at the corners of his eyes, and the laughter is lighting up his face, and Allura had never quite noticed how bright blue his eyes are before. Almost Altean except for the ink-dark pupils.

She realizes she could kiss him.

She could just catch him by the chin and do it, and he’d love it, and it would be sweet and stupid and he’d taste like whatever this brownies thing Hunk is bragging about tastes like, and he’s in love with her, and it would probably break his heart.

It is officially too soon off the rebound, by the common wisdom of her friends back home. Her ten thousand year dead friends back home. Also it would probably break his heart. She doesn’t love him. She knows that, right? Not like he does.

Humans grow so fast. Who knows where he’ll be in two years, changed as much as Keith?

He could give her his entire life, until he’s old and dying, and she wouldn’t even have a wrinkle, and knowing Lance, he’d probably give it willingly anyway, knowing he’d never get the same in return.

Just these few days ago, Shiro had laid out his agonies, and she knows now what nightmares had left him crying in the dark and here he is still capable of laughing. Making it look easy. That, she thinks, is one of the most precious things about him.

She could kiss him. It would be sweet and stupid and part of her wants to. So very stupid. So _selfish_ , to think—to think somebody so full of life and potential would want a dead end like—

She freezes, a stunned little noise caught in her throat, because even though she’s looking right at Lance, she’s not thinking of him.

Across their mountain nest, Shiro sits on a high rock like he needs to keep watch, hand clenching and unclenching on his knee, and Keith leans his head on his shoulder, and maybe they’re talking, very quietly.

_Oh quiznak_ , she thinks, and looks away.

They really are in some sort of awful feedback loop.

 

* * *

 

“We really are in some sort of awful feedback loop,” Allura says.

“Oh, hell,” Shiro says, and Lance feels a too-familiar kind of shuttering sensation from him, the pulling back, the guilt. It feels even worse now, damn it. He’s been _happy_ , these soft, measured little bursts of it. It’s been precious beyond words.

“All of us,” Allura adds, earnest. “Not just you. The—the feelings we have in common. The guilt, the self-doubt. They’re resonating. As if…as if they were synchronous waves, making each other stronger.”

Lance blinks slowly, not really making sense of the synchronous waves thing until he thinks of them like ocean waves, and then it hits him. “So is _that_ why I’ve been having basically a million feelings at all times ever?”

“There might be other reasons for that,” Shiro says slowly. He’s looking at his feet.

Lance holds up a finger at Allura. “Why do you say really, had you already thought this.” Then at Shiro. “Why do you say other reasons, what other reasons.”

Shiro and Allura trade glances, and Allura seems more willing to open her mouth, so she offers, “I’d…wondered about it, yes. When Shiro was talking with us. It wasn’t the right time to bring it up, and then I—well.”

Shiro gives her a small nod, something like gratitude. “You…might be right about that. Though I’ve also been thinking.” He closes his eyes for a moment. “I mostly deal with my emotions by setting them aside. It’s…how I am, even before everything. And I think in some ways we have that in common.”

“Mm.” Allura folds her hands in her lap, looks down at them. “I know I can’t put everything aside forever. I just…don’t know how to face it. It’s too much.”

Her voice has gotten very small. Lance aches quietly, wonders how much of those dreams she’s felt when waking

“I worry if we’re both putting that on Lance,” Shiro says, careful and firm. “The dealing.”

Allura’s face falls. “You…you’re saying we’re using him as some sort of—emotional processing unit?”

“Band name,” Lance blurts, without thinking.

Shiro blinks twice and answers, “Emo grindcore,” and Lance takes a moment to be really stupidly in love with him.

“Duh,” he answers with a grin. Then he takes a deep, shaky breath, looking between them. “Okay. Uh. I mean, the ominous suggestions are not mutually exclusive, we might all be having more feelings than usual because of the resonating thing, and that really explains a lot, but also…” He stalls out. Oh, hell. He should explain it. How does he explain it? “I think you might be right, Shiro, but only—well it’s—I think it’s mostly you.” His voice cracks a little as he looks at Allura.

“Oh, gods,” she breathes. “I didn’t realize. Lance, I’m sorry…”

“Why didn’t you speak up earlier?” Shiro asks, to Lance’s dread—at least he sounds more concerned than angry.

“Because it only got really weird last night and because it’s…” He makes a croaking noise. “Look just because I’m Team It Helps To Talk About Your Problems doesn’t mean I always know what I’m doing or how to help? God I wish I did. Holy fucking shit I wish I did, but I don’t, I’ve got no clue, I’m just some kid—” He’s running off at the mouth. Crap. He bites his lip hard. “Anyway, I already…”

He trails off again, because there’s something warm and solid on his shoulder and it’s Shiro’s hand.

“I’m way over my head here too, Lance,” Shiro says, quiet and frank. “And I hate it.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Allura asks faintly. “Well, of our species, of course—the Rycarna spend all their lives in empathic links, and if they were anywhere around here I’d ask them for aid, but it would take deca-phoebs to get there—at any rate, this is the sort of thing which made me wonder if we’re resonating.”

Lance takes a breath and tries to focus only on what _he’s_ feeling, which is still very messy, and also both harder and easier when _Shiro_ is _touching_ his _shoulder_.

“You’re doing great,” Shiro adds, equally quiet and frank.

“Oh Jesus-Mary-and-the-little-fishes,” Lance croaks, and buries his too-warm face in his hands.

“Lance?” Allura asks, soft and concerned.

“I’m fine it’s fine I’m just emotional because Shiro said nice things to me while I’m already having a lot of feelings,” Lance burbles.

“Oh, well that’s all right then,” Allura says, and there’s something—fond, dare Lance think it’s fond in her voice?

“I really need to stop making this a rare occurrence,” Shiro murmurs.

“Okay.” Lance forces a deep breath. “Okay, what was I saying, I was saying something—right yes, that’s.” He peels his hands off his face. “I already said it’s my job to feel stuff, I think? And that’s, okay it’s not the least stressful thing in the world, it’s messing with my beauty sleep, but the bond isn’t anybody’s fault, the way it works isn’t anybody’s fault, I think we’re all having a lot of feelings and I’m the one who winds up facing them the most which, don’t get me wrong, that sounds super heroic and it’s not, I’m just really really bad at doing the other thing? And I know neither of you meant to do it because you both look kinda sick about it. What worries me is if there’s stuff I’ve dreamt or felt or whatever and you _haven’t_.”

Whatever either of them was going to say dies, and they look at each other nervously.

“Have you,” Shiro starts, paling, “been remembering things, like I used to?”

“No—no, it’s not from you. I…okay, I kind of want to talk to you at some point, but maybe I should also talk with just you, if you want to know?” He aims the last at Allura, whose unease is already recomposing itself into quiet determination, because _Allura_.

“Of course.” She nods firmly. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Whenever _she’s_ ready, Lance thinks, but it’s not like she can know. It’s not like he should ask.

“How do we make it stop?” Shiro asks. “The resonance, how we’re using Lance, any of it?”

“I…” Allura trails to a halt. “I don’t know. All of this…it is neither alchemy nor our conscious wills, but some muddled mix of them both along with the parts of our minds unknown even to ourselves. I don’t know the answers. I’ve been looking, but I keep hitting walls.”

“It’ll probably get easier now that we’re thinking about it,” Lance says, because it seems obvious.

They both look at him.

“I mean, like…” He fumbles for an example. “Remember back before we even knew the bond was a thing at all, and we were having weird dreams and feeling stuff and not even knowing where it was coming from? And once we knew about the bond, we started to be able to figure out stuff like, hey, this feeling doesn’t quite feel like mine, oh this is Shiro’s, oh this is whoever’s, and focus on them or try to pull back or whatever?”

“This feeling doesn’t quite feel like mine,” Allura echoes, blinking. “That was when I realized it—when I realized I was having a feeling so similar to my own, but from you.” She nods to Shiro.

“How could you tell?” Shiro asks.

Allura goes very still, opens her mouth, closes it, and finally manages, “Context?”

She’s _embarrassed_ , Lance realizes. Whoa. Maybe she’d been thinking about Shiro? But why would that be like Shiro’s feelings—he isn’t pining anymore—well, this isn’t the time for that, there is so much worse stuff to talk about. Hooray.

Shiro simply digests that for a moment, sets it aside without comment, and says, “You said you were hitting walls—what kind of walls?”

Allura sighs. “I…to be honest, I’m not even sure. I keep searching for a deeper understanding of your connection to us, but I haven’t found anything. No matter how I imagine it or where I look.”

Shiro looks thoughtful for a moment, then says, “I…had a dream last night.” He flattens his hand on his knee and closes his eyes for a moment. “It was an odd sort of dream, almost lucid. I was wading into the sea—Earth’s sea, I think, it might have started as your dream.” He nods at Lance, and Lance feels a smile tug at his face regardless of everything. If only he could just leave them both dreaming of his beach forever, that would be so much nicer.

“I’ve had that dream too,” Allura murmurs.

Shiro goes on, describing the sea becoming deep and starry, the intersection between that and the salt-flat universe of the Black Lion and the dazzling open space with the white star in the distance. Allura’s listening with great intent when he’s done, hands clasped, ears all but pricked. Lance is pretty sure he’s catching flies.

“From there, I went towards my own side. After that…well, it was personal. But the intersection. I don’t know if that will help, but…”

“Yes,” Allura says. “I think it will. Thank you.” She’s quiet for a moment, as if weighing options. “Would you be willing to give Lance and I a moment to discuss what he’s seen?”

“Uh,” Lance says.

“Of course,” Shiro says.

“It might be more than a moment,” Lance finishes.

Allura fidgets with her fingertips. “It could wait, I suppose. I’d like to try searching for that connection again, but with you present. Both of you, I think. And with that dream as a guide. I…wish I could give you a more practical plan of action than that, but this whole business is…well.”

“That sounds as good a start as any.” Shiro gives a small, encouraging smile. “I’m starting to think it’s like working with the lions. Follow your instincts and your heart.”

Lance’s heart is sinking like ice. It’s a strange, groundless sort of panic. She shouldn’t, he thinks, and he doesn’t even know why. It’s _stupid_. She’s Allura, she’s always pulled off magic stuff before. But doesn’t she need to know? Doesn’t she need to understand her connection to Shiro?

He must still be catching flies something, because Shiro looks his way and his eyebrows knit and he asks, “Lance, are you okay?”

“I…I just…” He swallows hard. “Allura, sorry, this is weird, but can I, is it okay if I tell you the dreams of yours I had? Before you…I don’t know why they might be important, but…”

“Instincts?” Shiro asks quietly.

Allura lifts her chin, and might actually look a little relieved. “All right. You think it should be just us?”

Lance bites his lip and nods. “If you want to talk about it later, that’s fine, I just…you can make that call when you know it all?”

She nods, and Shiro nods as well, and stands, and leaves.

 

* * *

 

Lance tells the first dream a little rambling, but it’s short, and to the point, and really just embarrassing. It’s unavoidably true that Shiro’s handsome, to be sure, but it’s little more than that. She avoids comment.

Lance tells the second dream in short, clipped sentences, not quite daring to meet her eyes, and by the end it feels like an accusation of murder laid out in the thick, still silence between them.

“I suppose…from a certain point of view, I…”

Her voice dies in her throat. She feels like she’s freezing again, turning to ice. The vitals on the pod had been fading. Brain activity close to zero. If it had stopped, if his fragile human brain had started to lose electrical potential—she’d acted on impulse, instinct, thinking the clone too psychically battered by Honerva to have a soul left.

“I couldn’t sense…”

She hadn’t been able to sense anything. She’d been exhausted from the fight with Lotor, and her whole soul had been buzzing from her close touch with the Black Lion, and the entire burning life of Shiro was in her, and the concentrated she’d needed to hold even a single soul intact and safe and carry it a few feet was blinding, deafening—

“I don’t know if I could even have, once I—once I opened his mind—it was all so fast, Shiro was so bright, I just—”

There’s a vague murmur. Sounds. Warmth on her hand.

“I didn’t check,” she croaks. “Nothing in that body resisted me, I thought, I didn’t know—stars and fire, I wasn’t _thinking_.” Her throat tightens. “I didn’t check.”

She’s just like the others, fallible and without excuses and capable of change, except none of the others has carelessly overwritten a teammate’s soul because they _didn’t even bother to check._

Allura clamps a hand over her mouth, trying not to retch.

“Shit, Allura, I’m sorry…” The warmth on her hand is thicker, tighter. Lance is on his knees in front of her, holding her free hand in both of his, looking up at her with naked worry. His face blurs. “Allura…none of us asked. I-I didn’t even think to, it happened so quick and Keith said he was dying and…”

She wonders vaguely how he can stand to touch her.

She wonders, far less vaguely, how idiotic she’d been not to realize this earlier. Had she just—repressed it, kept it from herself for her own sanity, acted on impulse and made her excuses and let herself forget? She’d never understood why such a thing might happen until now. She—she’s made errors, she’s been used, but _this_ —

She should have known better. Even tired, desperate, driven by some wretched _need_ to have Shiro back—does it take so very little for her to betray her principles? They would have barely had to starve her at all, she thinks, slightly hysterically, if she’d been in Shiro’s place. Just bribe her with a little chance to help people and she’d cover her hands with blood. Bought with cheap change. Galra even think such things a weakness, worthy of mockery…

Using a convenient body without even checking the contents first. Just like Honerva might. Or _Lotor_. She could almost laugh. She’d never imagined, before, how Empress Allura could have built a world such as that—

She’s standing. She’s pulled her hand free of Lance’s, and he’s looking up at her with worry ratcheting up to fear in his eyes, and she can’t bear to see it any longer.

“Thank you,” she chokes out, “for telling me.”

And with that, she flees.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I live, this fic lives! Kinktober ate me. A zine and a bang are about to eat me but I can at least get some more done on this.
> 
> I managed to not add tags for a while, but there is a touch of the wish-I-was-dead sort of suicidal ideation in this chapter. Allura’s really fucked up right now, okay.

Shiro finds a rock to sit on with a very nice view, and breathes deep and slow up here in the bowl of this planet’s sky, and waits for Lance and Allura to be done.

The stars come out, one by one, as the sunset fades in deep purple-blues and a blue crescent ice-moon drags near the horizon.

He keeps thinking he should take this time to do _something_ , but he doesn’t know how long they’ll be, and the view is stunning, and there’s a big tangled blur of thoughts in his head that he isn’t entirely sure how to sort out, and he doesn’t remember when he last just sat like this. In the desert with Keith, that first time he showed him that hoverbike trick? Full of gnawing fear about his dying relationship, his dying body. That he would be cut out of the mission. That he was projecting too much of own dreams, his own future, now lost to him, onto this kid.

In the desert with Adam, both cadets, working out increasingly stupid hoverbike tricks and nearly dying at least twice. Lying on a mesa-top that they shouldn’t even legally be on and talking about how someday they’ll watch the stars come out on another world.

Nearly a decade ago. Jesus.

The wind surges a little, howls low in the night, and fades, and he realizes how damn _quiet_ it is without the thrum of a ship or a lion constantly in his bones.

Years he’s been in space, one way or one body or another, and he’s never just sat and watched the stars come out. This damn war. Always this damn war.

In the gathering dark, he sees a slim black figure pull itself gracefully to the top of a nearby crag. Then another, taller. Then a poof of light materializing beside them. He smiles softly, watches them settle.

There’s a soft scuff of footsteps behind him, and he stiffens, breathes in the night, relaxes, and turns.

Lance—just Lance—is slinking up, hands jammed in his pockets, sagging.

“Lance…?”

“Hey. Uh…I don’t know if Allura will be doing her thing tonight? She…left.”

Shiro takes that in for a moment, along with the miserable worry Lance is radiating—perfectly clear even without a psychic link—and shifts over, hoping that’s inviting enough without actually patting the rock beside him.

Lance settles quietly beside him, then squirms a little, like he isn’t sure what to say.

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Shiro asks gently.

“I…don’t know.” He curls up, pulling his knees to his chest. “It messed her up even more than I thought it would. A-and I knew it would. I just…” He’s silent for a long while, long enough for Shiro to settle his hand on his shoulder in encouragement, and then he makes some faint noise and leans into it just a little. He’s tenser than Shiro’s ever felt him, shoulders rigid under his palm.

“You thought she needed to know.”

“Mm.” He falls silent again, then says, very slowly, “Was it better not knowing about the things you regret?”

Shiro takes a careful breath, and looks at the stars, and doesn’t close his eyes, and knows exactly what Lance was talking with Allura about. “That…depends, I suppose. Those first few days on Arus, before I knew about the arena…I was terrified of what I’d remember because I didn’t want to break down, but I didn’t think I’d be a different kind of person. Once I knew that I’d been the Champion…I drove myself up the wall wondering what kind of monster I’d become. Remembering more—I hated every moment of it, but but at least I was better able to account for myself.”

Lance digests that while fidgeting with the sleeves of his hoodie—he’s tugged them down over his hands like paws. “Can I…can I ask…”

“Mm?”

“Maybe you don’t remember or you don’t want to talk about it, but…your clone, at the end. Was he…what did he want?”

“To protect you all. More than anything. He fought like hell for that.” Shiro does close his eyes for a moment, steadying himself. “Is this about Allura merging us?”

Lance turtles further, shoulders rigid and bony. “It…yeah. She…had nightmares about it. Only she didn’t, I did.”

“We need to stop doing that to you,” Shiro mutters, a gnarl of guilt-ridden _frustration_ tightening in his belly.

Lance scrubs his sleeve-paws over his face with a twitch, then says, low and a little sharp, “You need to stop guilt-tripping about it.”

“Lance—”

“Look. It hurts, it sucks. But you’re not doing it on purpose, and—and it’s not _having_ the dreams that hurts. It’s knowing that they’re yours. Or hers. Because the universe freaking has it out for both of you for some reason, and I hate it, and I want it to stop, but I know it doesn’t work like that, I’m not stupid. I _know_ I can’t just make it go away and make you happy. But…” He makes a small frustrated noise. “But nothing, I guess. That’s it. There’s nothing to do, I’m just more worried about you than I am about me.”

Shiro lets out a slow breath and slides his arm the rest of the way around Lance’s tense shoulders. “I’m more worried about you than I am about me,” he echoes, quiet and wry.

“Well now we just sound dumb,” Lance mumbles, and turns into Shiro’s shoulder when he pulls, re-turtling against his side.

There are more stars now. The band of this galaxy, broader than the Milky Way because of its shape, brighter because this planet is closer to the core, is arcing across the dark sky. Shiro squeezes Lance against his side and doesn’t let go, and okay, he was probably right about the hugs. Not that he isn’t spending time close to Keith, of course, but—well, apparently it’s made him clingy. Embarrassing. At least Lance isn’t likely to mind?

“I’d realized a while ago,” Shiro starts, slow and quiet, “that the universe has it out for me. I just…” He takes a deep, shaky breath, because he’d never expected to put this into words to anyone. Not like this. Then again, he’d never expected to put any number of things into words. “You know the thing where you tell yourself stories about what your life means to try to make sense of it?” Lance, of all people—he might understand that part.

“Mm.” Lance is busy hesitantly introducing one arm around Shiro’s back in return, and Shiro doesn’t expect him to say anything else, until he murmurs, “The thing that makes us people.”

Shiro turns that over for a moment. “Maybe…it is.”

“One of my aunts said that once.”

Shiro squishes him closer and wishes he had two arms to put around him. Not that he’d want the old one back for anything, and he’s not let himself wish for the real one for ages, but it’s…frustrating. “I kept thinking, even if I didn’t put it into words, that maybe it was like a. A deal. Things happened to me instead of those I care for, those I’d promised to protect. I would’ve been okay with that deal. But this…”

“So the universe is in breach of contract?” Lance says into his armpit. “Shitty, shitty contract?”

Shiro huffs a laugh. “Yeah. I might have to write to its manager. Strongly worded.”

“Ooh. Nobody would want to get a strongly worded letter from _you_.” Lance is done hesitating, apparently; he’s got both arms wrapped around Shiro now, pressing close. “I, uh…I think I like the version where it’s spread around. More fair.”

“Hn.” Shiro can’t help a bit of protective tightening. “Though this is hardly that version. ’S not spread around fairly or anything. Just copy-pasted.”

Lance snort-giggles and doesn’t manage to stop for a bit. “True. True. _Shiro_. Why do you never let on that you’re funny?”

“Because I have a terrible sense of humor and I’m supposed to be a whole professional paladin and team leader?”

“Well you’re retired now so you can let it go?” Lance winces almost immediately. “Sorry. That was…”

“It’s okay.” Shiro squishes him hard enough that he squeaks and relaxes a little. “It’s not bothering me as much as last time. I know why Black can’t take me, and I…I have less to prove than I did then. Than my clone did. Mostly I’m trying to survive and help you guys along.”

“Well, you can do that with a terrible sense of humor,” Lance says lightly.

“Sure, but I don’t want Krolia to judge me.”

“Oh my god,” Lance says after a moment. “Oh my _god_. She’s his _mom._ That went _really_ fast to meeting his mom.  Yeah. Legit.”

And they’re both still up on that other crag. Not in earshot, thank god.

“Though wasn’t she with him those whole two years?” Lance goes on. “Knowing him, he was probably singing your praises the whole time.”

Shiro feels his face heat, just a little. “Not the _whole_ time.”

“Okay, yeah, he sleeps sometimes. I think. Does he sleep?”

Shiro snorts. “Galra sleep, Keith sleeps, he talks about other things too.”

“Are you _sure._ ”

“Yes, jeez, Lance—” Shiro lets go of his shoulders to noogie him, just lightly, and Lance laughs and wriggles.

Movement on the other crag catches Shiro’s eye, and he lifts his head. Lance notices, cranes his neck. Keith’s standing. One gesture of his hand. Krolia doesn’t seem alarmed, just stretches out, and Keith grabs Kosmo’s ruff and vanishes in a flash.

Shiro half-expects him to appear right next to them, but there’s nothing; he can’t hear the bang-hiss of disturbed air anywhere nearby.

“Aw crap, I didn’t even see him there,” Lance whispers.

“No way they can hear us,” Shiro says, and bundles him back against his side.

Only then does he realize that Lance has never teased him quite like this before. Hunk or Pidge, sure, Keith with more edge to it, but he’d been too busy idolizing him until now, perhaps, or walking on eggshells, or—something. This, though—this is much better. Even when both their smiles fade quickly, dragged down by everything else—it’s good.

“There’s…” His throat sticks on the next sentence for a moment. It’s not like last time, forcing out all the pain and uncertainty. It’s just—how does he even explain those dreams? Who he is? But Lance is worrying, and…

“Shiro?” Lance prompts softly.

“Mm. Sorry. There’s something I haven’t told either you or Allura yet. But it’s…probably relevant.”

“Yeah?” There’s worry shading back into his voice. Damn it, could _any_ of them stop having to sound like that for five minutes at a time? It’s getting frustrating. Even to Shiro.

“I’ve…been talking to him in my dreams sometimes. The clone, I mean.”

Lance sits bold upright with a little inhale between his teeth, eyes widening. “Like…like how?”

 

* * *

 

Allura folds her hands back over her com earrings as the call with Keith ends and their light flicks out.

It’s one of her oldest memories. Her father giving those to her, smiling as she smiled, holding them up and watching them sparkle in the Altean sun. Or—had that been the first pair, the purple, that she’d lost one of, and she’d picked out the pink replacements with him, chin-to-elbow in the smooth silver-and-white of a very nice shop that did all the audio calibrations right there for them?

The shop lady had red markings and red hair to match that had glowed like fire in the light coming in the window. Allura remembers that. She doesn’t remember how old she’d been, or anything her father had said, except something about pink. Had he liked it or had he thought it was too matchy? She doesn’t remember. Too matchy, probably. Or too serious. She had always worn a _lot_ of pink, long before it was appropriate.

It would have been so much easier, she thinks, for the hundredth thousandth time, to have died with Altea. Burned in the final bombardment, or crushed when the planet’s crust collapsed, or evaporated in some magma flow to melt her ashes into the slowly cooling rubble. She would have been better off. The universe too.

She opens her hands to watch the earrings sparkle, and knows how profoundly she must have disappointed him, over and over, wherever amongst the stars he’s watching, and closes them.

“Allura?” Keith asks from somewhere nearby.

She only jumps a little, at least, and manages to swallow her gasp into a gracious inhale, and nods.

He sits across from her, here where she’s hidden in the curl of Blue’s tail. “What’s wrong?”

“I…” Allura forces herself to exhale, inhale again, center herself, because her voice is a little shaky, and this isn’t about pity. “I…” She should start gracefully, she thinks. She should give him context. Not burden him. His brow is crumpling in concern. Gods, why had she even asked him? “I ruggled up,” is what comes out, quite small.

“When?”

“When I brought Shiro back.” She tries the whole inhaling and exhaling thing again, but her whole chest is tight. “I.” She bites her lip, shoves aside excuses. “I didn’t check. Whether there was still a soul in his body. What that soul wanted.”

“Oh,” Keith says.

Silence stretches. The thin hide of his half-gloves creaks a little as he clenches his hands, white-knuckled, staring at the ground.

“Is it horrible of me to say,” Keith says, quite slowly, “that I’m not complaining about the result? Even if…” His face darkens.

Allura puts her forehead against her clasped hands. They’re aching, she realizes after a moment, from clutching her earrings so hard. “Me neither. But…to have sacrificed another teammate for that so callously. Even one who was compromised…” She bites her lip. “Do you think he would have been…his own person? If he’d had the chance?”

Keith lets out a slow sigh, and huddles up himself, hugging one knee to his chest. “I don’t know.” He’s silent for a time. “There was…this one moment. After I cut his arm off. His eyes cleared, and he looked at me, and called my name. He sounded…so much like Shiro. I hadn’t realized yet.” He huffs, faint and derisive. “We were fighting amongst rows and rows of clones sleeping in tanks, but I hadn’t realized, not until I talked with Shiro inside Black. I guess I was distracted by the whole him trying to kill me thing.”

Allura’s picked her head up to watch him. Gods. _Keith_. He’s never spoken of what happened when he was gone. “There were other clones?”

“Dozens.” Keith hunches just a little further. “Hundreds, maybe. Most of…the whole facility blew up. They’re probably all dead now.”

“Who…?”

“Killed them?” Keith’s gloves creak again; he’s whip-tense. “Haggar, I suppose. Through Shiro.”

“What a ruggling waste,” Allura breathes, face crumpling.

More silence stretches, until Keith finally swallows hard and asks, “Did you…sense anything? In his body, when you…?”

“Nothing jumped out at me. I…I like to think I would have stopped…” It sounds pathetic, such a little shred of an excuse.

“I think you would have too,” Keith says, and Allura makes a tiny, choked little noise and squeezes her earrings tighter.

“I was tired,” she says. “And distracted, and Shiro was so blindingly bright.” And it had nothing to do with the other dream Lance saw; that’s just stray hormones, irrelevant. “Nothing jumped out at me. But I didn’t look.”

Keith bites his lip. “I’ve…never been sure how much of him was in the arm. Whether…whether I killed him then. Or whether Haggar had already done too much damage when she took him.” It’s his turn to hide his face now, pressed against his knee. “I have to keep telling myself—he and Shiro are one. I was fighting to bring Shiro back, any part of him. He’s himself again, alive, Shiro, free, like he must have wanted. I don’t know whether it’s true.” His voice is smaller than Allura’s ever heard it, strangled. “It just…I have to believe it because otherwise I couldn’t live with myself.”

It’s so frank, almost matter-of-fact, that Allura feels a stab of raw terror. If that’s not true, if she loses Keith too—

“And I’m just,” Keith starts again. “How damn selfish am I? He wants me, somehow, after all this time, so of course I’m taking what I can get. He says…he remembers being the clone. He must remember that fight. If he—if I killed him, if he hated me for killing him, he wouldn’t want me. Would he?”

Keith’s voice cracks on the last.

Allura doesn’t remember reaching for his hand, where it’s clenched white-knuckled on his knee, but it’s hot under her fingers. He twitches.

“Sorry,” he says, a little hurried. “Sorry, I. You’re upset, I shouldn’t be—”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Allura says, soft and urgent. “I…I know I shouldn’t cheat, but, Keith, he adores you. He really doesn’t do a good job of hiding it.”

Keith makes a small, choked noise, then picks up his head for a moment to look at her with something more like terror than anger, then puts it back down. “I…I still don’t know what that means for…for what I did. Or what you did, or didn’t do.” He blows out air. “Usually when I feel this shitty about something, I just. Run. I promised myself I’m not gonna do that anymore, but I don’t know what else to do.”

There’s—only one answer, really. She’d already known what it was, she thinks. She’d just been—wallowing. They don’t even need an empathic link to set each other off, apparently. Wells of guilt locked deep within.

Nothing to do but keep moving forward. Just like Lance had said.

She has to swallow hard to get her voice working, and she squeezes Keith’s hand gently and says, “We should talk with him.”

 

* * *

 

Lance listens in wide-eyed silence, and somewhere in there he’s unpeeled himself from Shiro’s side to sit up, studying his face like he’s trying to peer into Shiro’s soul. Souls?

“I cried for you,” he whispers. His eyes look damp now, here in the starlight, and his hand’s hovering an inch from Shiro’s face, like he doesn’t quite dare touch. “But…not soon enough, I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t even know what to think…”

Shiro opens his mouth to say that he isn’t even sure the clone can hear him, in whatever sense he still exists, but the words die in his throat. Something aches in his chest. Relief? Sorrow? Lance’s face is dim in the starlight, and Shiro’s hand against it, mirroring his not-quite-touch, seems ghostly pale.

“You did enough,” he manages finally. “You did all right. You were…probably his closest friend, after he messed things up with Keith.”

Lance’s brow furrows, just a little, and he opens his mouth, radiating doubt, and Shiro goes on before he can speak.

“As _you_. Not as a substitute for Keith, but as yourself. He’d want you to be okay, Lance. He’d want you to forgive yourself.”

Lance crumples a little at that, and turns to rest his cheek against Shiro’s palm, and his skin is terribly soft, and Shiro doesn’t dare pull back. He’s resting his other hand other Shiro’s, just lightly, and Shiro can almost feel the heat of his breath, and he kind of desperately wants the pain in Lance’s eyes to fade—foolish, his friend is dead, his friend is a coil of memories and lost freedom, his friend is right here—and for a moment, he gives in to gravity and kisses Lance’s forehead, soft and chaste.

Lance stops breathing.

Then he buries his face in both hands, quivering a little, and Shiro slides his arm around his shoulders and pulls him close.

He doesn’t quite know how long they’re like that. Lance isn’t quite crying, just shaking with emotion, and he isn’t sure what to say, and the mountain wind is starting to blow chill.

“Thank you,” Lance says finally, muffled, into his shirt, and Shiro almost has to ask him to repeat it. “I’m gonna miss him.”

“I was missing out on being friends with you. Before all this. I think I’d like to keep that going.”

“You already are.” Lance finally peels his hands off his face, hugs him back. “You already are.”

It’s instinct, more than anything else, that makes Shiro pick his head up. A prickle down his spine.

Keith and Allura are picking their way up the path, two small figures in the dark. They’re both moving slowly, tightly contained, heads down.

Lance makes a questioning little noise, then pulls back as his head comes up, concern lining his face.

“You…told him?” Allura asks, in a voice tight and quiet like he’s never heard from her.

Lance bites his lip, guilty, and Shiro shakes his head. “I guessed,” he answers for him, and Lance ducks his head.

“Shiro,” Allura starts, and she looks more small and tired and defeated than he’s ever seen. Not even after shattering her father’s hologram, or the fight with Lotor, or anything. “I’m…” Her eyes search his, and she stalls out for a moment.

He holds up his hand. “Allura. Before you…” Hate yourself too much? That ship might have sailed. He bites his lip, restarts at the important part. “Let me tell you what I just told Lance. Both of you.” Keith, too, looks a little wrecked, and his heart aches for him. “You need to know.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am not in control of this fic, nor am I in control of my [tumblr](http://letterblade.tumblr.com). More soon.


End file.
